She does not know what she will find behind the locked door. She can almost picture Bradley’s wife there, imprisoned for threatening to leave, now deranged and knocking, wasting away. Or perhaps it is some twisted, demented child there, the son he won’t acknowledge, the son he fears. Gothic plots unspool in her head from her brittle paper childhood, all the dog-eared paperbacks of Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, in great stacks from the library. She filled her head with fairy tales and romances, female spies, and damsels in distress who expected rescue. When she met her husband, she emptied her head to make room for his revelations. Now she has nothing and she wishes she had stocked up on survival manuals to stuff herself full of ways to cope. She tests the door; it is locked still. She tells herself the room may be empty. The knocking is a loose shingle, a wayward branch. But she remembers the flying shoe and the voices. A brass key hangs from a bent nail on the door frame.
