“But what will you do?”
“I thought I might buy that house.” They were passing an attractive white-painted cottage with green shutters. “I’m going to have lots of time for holidays.”
She felt rather sorry for him. “It’s a pretty house,” she said. “Is it for sale, though?” ,
“There’s a board on the other side. I was poking around earlier. Come and see.”
They walked around the house. It was locked up, and the shutters were closed, so they could not look into the rooms, but from the outside it was appealing. It had a wide veranda with a hammock. There was a tennis court in the garden. On the far side was a small building without windows, which Nancy guessed was a boathouse. “You could have a boat,” she said. Peter had always liked sailing.
A side door to the boathouse stood open. Peter went inside. She heard him say: “Good God!”
She stepped through the doorway and peered into the gloom. “What is it?” she said anxiously. “Petey, are you all right?”
Peter appeared beside her and took her arm. For a split second she saw a nasty, triumphant grin on his face, and she knew she had made a terrible mistake. Then he jerked her arm violently, pulling her farther in. She stumbled, cried out, dropped her shoes and handbag, and fell to the dusty floor.
“Peter!” she cried out furiously. She heard him take three rapid steps; then the door banged and she was in darkness. “Peter?” she called, fearful now. She got to her feet. There was a scraping sound and then a knock as if something was being used to jam the door. She yelled out: “Peter! Say something!”
There was no reply.
Hysterical fear bubbled up in her throat and she wanted to scream in terror. She put her hand to her mouth and bit the knuckle of her thumb. After a moment the panic began to recede.
Standing there in the dark, blind and disoriented, she realized he had planned this all along: he had found the empty house with its convenient boathouse, lured her here and locked her in so that she would miss the plane and be unable to vote at the board meeting. His regrets, his apology, his talk of giving up business and his painful honesty had all been faked. He had cynically evoked their childhood to soften her. Once again she had trusted him; once again he had betrayed her. It was enough to make her weep.
She bit her lip and considered her situation. When her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she was able to see a line of light under the door. She walked toward it, holding both hands out in front of her. When she reached the door, she felt the wall on both sides of it and found a switch. She flipped it up and the boathouse was flooded with light. She found the handle of the door and tried, without any real hope, to push it open. It did not budge: he had jammed it well. She put her shoulder to the door and heaved with all her might, but it would not move.
Her elbows and knees hurt where she had fallen, and her stockings were torn. “You pig,” she said to the absent Peter.
She put on her shoes, picked up her handbag and looked around. Most of the space was taken up by a big sailing boat on a wheeled dolly. Its mast hung in a cradle from the ceiling, and its sails were folded in neat bundles on the deck. At the front of the boathouse was a wide door. Nancy examined it and found, as she expected, that it was securely locked.
The house was set back from the beach a little, but there was a chance that passengers from the Clipper, or even someone else, might meander past. Nancy took a deep breath and shouted at the top of her voice:
Both the front and side doors were stout and well-fitting, but she might be able to break them open with a crowbar or something. She looked around. The owner was a neat man: he did not keep gardening tools in his boathouse. There were no shovels or rakes.
She shouted for help again, then climbed onto the deck of the boat, still looking for a tool. There were several closets on deck, but all had been locked shut by the tidy owner. She looked around the place again from up on the deck, but she saw nothing new. “Damn, damn, damn!” she said aloud.
She sat on the raised centerboard and brooded despondently. It was quite cold in the boathouse, and she was glad of her cashmere coat. She continued to call for help every minute or so but, as time passed, her hopes diminished. The passengers would be back on board the Clipper by now. Soon it would take off, leaving her behind.
It struck her that losing the company might be the least of her worries. Suppose nobody came by this boathouse for a week? She could die here. Panicking, she began to yell loudly and continuously. She could hear a note of hysteria in her voice, and that scared her even more.
After a while she got tired, and that calmed her. Peter was wicked but he was not a murderer. He would not leave her to die. He probably intended to place an anonymous call to the Shediac police department and tell them to let her out. But not until after the board meeting, of course. She told herself she was safe, but she still felt deeply uneasy. What if Peter was more wicked than she thought? What if he should forget? What if he fell ill, or suffered some sort of accident? Who would save her then?
She heard the roar of the Clipper’s mighty engines sounding out across the bay. From panic her mood switched to total despair. She had been betrayed and defeated, and she had even lost Mervyn, who would be on board the plane by now, waiting to take off. He might wonder idly what had happened to her, but since her last words to him had been “You fool!” he probably figured she was through with him.
It had been arrogant of him to assume she would follow him to England, but to be realistic about it, any man would have made the same assumption, and she had been silly to get mad about it. Now they had parted angrily and she would never see him again. She might even die.
The roar of the distant engines rose to a crescendo. The Clipper was taking off. The noise persisted at high volume for a minute or two, then began to fade as, Nancy presumed, the plane climbed into the distant sky. That’s it, she thought; I’ve lost my business and I’ve lost Mervyn, and I’m probably going to starve to death here. No, she would not starve, she would die of thirst, raving and screaming in agony....
She felt a tear on her cheek, and wiped it away with the cuff of her coat. She had to pull herself together. There must be a way out of here. She looked around again. She wondered if she could use the mast as a battering ram. She reached up to the sling. No, the mast was much too heavy to be moved by one person. Could she cut through the door somehow ? She recalled stories of prisoners in medieval dungeons scratching the stones with their fingernails year after year in a vain attempt to dig a way out. She did not have years, and she would need something stronger than fingernails. She looked in her bag. She had a small ivory comb, a bright red lipstick almost used up, a cheap powder compact the boys had given her for her thirtieth birthday, an embroidered handkerchief, her checkbook, a five-pound note; several fifty-dollar bills and a small gold pen: nothing she could use. She thought of her clothes. She was wearing a crocodile belt with a gold-plated buckle. The point of the buckle might be used to gouge away the wood of the door around the lock. It would be a long job, but she had all the time in the world.
She climbed off the boat and located the lock on the big front door. The wood was quite stout, but perhaps she would not need to scratch all the way through: when she had made a deep groove it might then break. She shouted for help again. No one answered.
She took off her belt. Her skirt would not stay up without it, so she took that off, folded it neatly and draped it over the gunwale of the boat. Although no one could see her, she was glad she was wearing pretty panties with a lacy trim and a matching garter belt.
She scratched a square mark all around the lock and then began to make it deeper. The metal of her buckle was not very strong, and after a while the prong bent. Nevertheless she carried on, stopping every minute or so to shout. Slowly the mark became a groove. Sawdust trickled out and drifted to the floor.
The wood of the door was soft, perhaps because of the damp air. The work went more quickly and she began to think she might get out soon.
Just as she was becoming hopeful, the prong snapped off.
She picked it up from the floor and tried to continue, but without the buckle the prong on its own was hard to handle. If she dug deep it slipped from her fingers, and if she scratched lightly she made the groove no deeper. After dropping it five or six times she cursed aloud, cried tears of rage and hammered uselessly on the door with her fists.
A voice called: “Who’s there?”
