Page 40 of I'll Be Waiting

“He’d be too embarrassed to do that. He could lose his job. He’d be trying to find another way out.”

“Fine. Come in, and check the basement door and we will ask the other two participants whether they touched it.”

“Thank you.”

The basement door is still locked, and no one has touched it. Of course, we can’t go down there to look for Brodie because… it’s locked. Jin still takes pity on the woman and shouts through the door asking whether Brodie’s there, if he needs help.

There’s no answer.

“What about a window?” Jin asks. “Maybe we can get in that way?”

“There aren’t any as far as I know,” I say, “but we can check.”

Jin and I do that, braving the bugs to circle the exterior of the house and confirm there are no basement windows.

“Who has the key?” Jin asks Mrs. Kilmer when we come back in.

“The owner,” she says.

“We’ll contact them and ask—”

She rocks forward, alarm flashing across her face. “Please don’t. It’s fine.”

“Does Brodie have the key?” I ask.

It takes her a moment to answer, which has Jin and me exchanging a puzzled look. She finally says she isn’t sure. Then she quickly takes her leave and hurries off.

“Does any of this make sense?” Shania says when Mrs. Kilmer is gone.

“Not to me,” I mutter. “She thinks he may have gone into the basement for tools. In the middle of the night? Without a key to the front door? When there are guests here, and she’s not even sure hehasa key to the basement? Either she’s desperate and grasping at straws, or there’s a big part of this story she’s not telling us.”

“I’m going for option B,” Jin says. “She’s not telling us something.”

“Agreed,” Cirillo says grimly.

I look at that door. “Okay, this is going to sound weird.”

“Weirder than ‘I think my son is trapped in your basement’?” Jin says.

“I heard noises down here last night.”

Jin snaps his fingers. “Right. You mentioned that.” He turns to the door. “You think he mightreallybe down there?”

“What did you hear?” Shania asks.

“Thumps,” I say. “I thought it was a shutter banging, but there aren’t any. I tracked the sound to the locked room over there. But what if it was really coming from the basement?”

“That wouldn’t explain why the door is still locked,” Cirillo says.

“I saw the door last night,” Jin says. “It was shut. So any theory that Brodie left it ajar and we accidentally locked him down there is nonsense.”

“What about the dumbwaiter shaft?” Shania asks.

We head there, and I open it.

“Too narrow,” Jin says. “Even Shania would barely fit in there.”

I nod. “If Brodie somehow ended up in the basement, he’d have answered when Jin called. By now, he would have given up on finding another way out.”

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