As a newlywed, she hadn’t understood the purpose of the room or why she had been told it and the elevator were off-limits to all but her husband, Call. She would later understand only too well.
The elevator smelled just as Trace’s room had, old and musty, filled with ghosts from the past. As she closed the gate, she was bombarded by a barrage of memories that made her sick to her stomach.
Her breath came in gasps, her fingers trembling. She pushed the button that would take her up to the locked room.
“Pepper, why would you want to go up there again?” asked the voice in her head, a voice that sounded exactly like her husband, Call’s. “What if you get trapped up there and no one finds you until the house is torn down or just falls down someday?”
Enid and Alfred were in the far wing of the house. They wouldn’t have heard the elevator. Nor would they hear her cries for help. Eventually they would find her but by then—
The elevator groaned and clanked and for a moment she thought it wouldn’t rise. Then with a jerk it began to ascend.
She pressed the hand holding the cane against the wall to steady herself, the other to her mouth to keep from crying out as the elevator inched upward.
In the small, isolated space she thought she could hear voices trapped from all those years ago. The screams of her children. The incessant crying and pleading. The empty finality when the elevator stopped.
Pepper reached for the metal gate, terrified the elevator might suddenly drop as she took a step out. Miraculously it didn’t move as she stepped off to find herself standing at the edge of the small room.
The room was soundproof. Not even the bulletproof window opened. Anyone sent here could not be heard outside these walls. Nor seen through the one-way glass.
The only openings were small. Just large enough for a gun barrel to fit through.
“Why in God’s name did you have this room built?” Pepper had demanded when Call had once caught her snooping. She’d been pregnant with their oldest child, Virginia, at the time.
Call had been furious with her. “It’s for protection.”
“Against whom?”
He’d only shaken his head and escorted her from the room.
It wasn’t until later that she and her children learned that the room was also for punishment.
This room was where Call had locked her the day she’d tried to leave him.
RUBY BEGAN TO cry quietly. McCall wondered what her mother was thinking, what she was feeling. Was she relieved? Angry? Or just saddened by the news? McCall couldn’t tell.
Ruby hid so much. Her only passion seemed to be men. It was the only time she let her emotions out. Over men she cried, swore, broke things, poured out her soul.
Except when it came to Trace Winchester. Maybe he really had been the love of her life, just as she claimed.
McCall turned off on the road to Sleeping Buffalo Resort and drove down to the hot springs, parking in front of the bar.
“I thought you might need a drink,” she said to her mother.
Ruby wiped her eyes and opened her purse to pull out a wad of ones. “I’ll buy if you’ll go in and get us something.”
McCall wasn’t much of a drinker. “What do you want?”
“Tequila. Get a pint and something to chase it, okay?”
Tequila was the booze of preference for Ruby after a breakup. It seemed appropriate given the circumstances.
McCall took the wad of ones and got out. As she closed the pickup door, she saw her mother roll down her window and light a cigarette, her fingers trembling.
When she returned with a quart of orange juice, a pint of tequila and two paper cups, her mother stubbed out her cigarette. The pickup smelled of smoke and grease and sweat.
McCall handed everything to her mother and drove down by the lake, parking in the shade of a large old cottonwood.
Ruby busied herself making them both a drink. They touched cups, eyes meeting for a moment. McCall felt the impact finally.
Her father was dead. Murdered. Nothing would ever be the same. Especially if it turned out that Ruby had killed him.
PEPPER STARTED TO step farther into the room when she was startled by movement. Something small fluttered in the far corner, making her stumble back. As she tried to still her racing pulse, she realized that the slight breeze coming up through the elevator shaft had rustled the small paper objects in the corner.
Frowning, she stepped closer. Paper party hats? They were faded with the years, but still recognizable as the tiny ones she’d purchased for Trace’s birthday party. She’d bought the tiny ones for the grandchildren and had been upset when she’d seen them wearing them long before the party.
She remembered yelling at the bunch of them to get out of the house. They had scampered away.
She stared at the paper hats discarded like trash on the floor of the room, realization making her weak. They’d been in this room that they’d been forbidden to enter.
Pepper felt her anger rise as she counted the hats. Five? Had there been five children in here that day? She remembered how noisy they’d been, her two grandsons, Cordell and Cyrus, and the nanny’s boy, Jack. Had they taken extra hats or had someone been with them? She hadn’t invited any other children. But that didn’t mean that those two horrible neighboring ranch girls hadn’t sneaked over.
As she started to rise, she saw something that stopped her heart stone-cold still before it took off like a wild horse.
What she’d first thought were cracks in the plastered wall, she now saw were words. Tiny, scrawled words scratched into the walls. They were everywhere—within child height.
Pepper closed her eyes unable to bear reading what her children had written up here while imprisoned in this horrible room.
The room had always been empty. No furniture. “It’s no punishment if you
