Crooked House by Joe McKinney, Wayne Miller

shrieking. She’d heard a voice, an angry, nasty-sounding voice. But Angela had denied it, and after looking into her daughter’s tear stained face, there’d been no question the girl was telling the truth. She’d heard nothing. And her tears? When Sarah had asked her what was wrong, Angela had said: “I want to go home, Mommy. I want to go home.”
    She’d been uprooted from her friends, her school, everything she’d come to know and trust in her short life . Tears were to be expected.
    But what of that god-awful smell in the hallway outside Angela’s room? That had definitely been real. Even Robert – who had denied hearing any voices – had commented on the smell, though how he could mistake the stench of raw sewage for smoke was beyond her.
    And so it came back to Robert. Her mind kept circling him, coming back to him. There was a gravity there that she couldn’t deny, and sooner rather than later, she knew she was going to have to talk to him about what was going on in their marriage. She was really dreading that conversation, though. There was no way to predict how it would go, how he would react.
    Well, she could always go up there and cut up her credit card on his desk . He’d probably appreciate that.
    And she’d tell him she was going back to work . She didn’t know what, exactly, some kind of office job. It’d be a good thing for everybody. It’d bring in some extra cash for the house, and it would give Sarah something to do outside of this damned house.
    Yeah, she thought, she’d do that.
    She got out of bed, slipped on a pair of jeans and her sandals, got her Visa from her purse, and headed up the stairs to Robert’s office.
    She got as far as the landing before she stopped and looked to her right, down the short hallway that led to Robert’s study. His door was open and she thought she could hear him pacing in there, talking to himself. Sarah stood on the landing for a long time with the Visa card in her hand trying to work up the courage to go in there. But what was she going to say? What could she say? The things she’d decided on downstairs now seemed like too little too late, a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. What would he think now of her offer to cut up the credit card, or to go out and get a job? It would, she knew, only lead to a lot of questions that didn’t need asking. The past was what it was, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
    But she didn’t move from the landing . Now, more than ever, she felt like this house didn’t really belong to her. Or, rather, she didn’t belong here. That morning she’d felt like she was waking in a hotel, and that feeling hadn’t dissipated. If anything, it’d grown more acute, more pronounced. This wasn’t her house, and it did not welcome her.
    She stopped there, her train of thought abruptly quieted.
    Her attention had drifted to the east wing, to the room that had made her so upset earlier in the day. At the door to the sitting room she saw seven little off-color circles in the wood floor. Somebody had done a fairly professional job of cleaning those up and fitting them to the surrounding wood, but they were still faintly visible. She looked up, and along the top of the doorway, saw matching filled holes. The significance of what she was looking at eluded her until she connected the holes with imaginary bars, and then she gasped.
    Oh my God, she thought . This wasn’t a room. This was a cell. Oh my God.
    She felt sick to her stomach, a little dizzy.
    Oh God.
    She wanted to back away, but at the same time she couldn’t . Her curiosity was too strong. She stepped forward slowly, cautiously, a finger trailing along the open door as she stepped inside. There were no windows, no closets set into the walls, only old-fashioned chairs arranged around delicate little card tables. It was a dreary room, lit by a small fixture in the center of the ceiling – a fixture, Sarah knew, that must have been added in recent years. It probably