Trap Door by Sarah Graves

if it had come up from my shoes, I let myself relax against him.
    “Hey, you’re my girl,” Wade said in the same deep, calm voice that had captured me back when I first met him. “And he’s pulled your irons out of the fire a few times, hasn’t he? Only fair, help him out in return.”
    I nodded, feeling Wade’s muscular shoulder against my cheek. When I first met him I thought he was a man’s man, the kind who went hunting and fishing with his buddies, no girls allowed. He’d be the type who on Sunday afternoon watched endless football, getting up at halftime only to work on his truck, and who thought men’s jewelry was silly with the possible exception of the Timex.
    And I’d been right; Wade was all that. In the dashboard’s pale glow his short blond hair gleamed, his eyes scanning the road ahead competently.
    “’Bout a week, though, the mosquitoes are going to drive him out of there,” he reminded me. “Or suck him so dry he’ll need a blood transfusion. Blackflies, too.”
    “I hadn’t thought of that.” But it was true, man-eating tigers would be preferable to the insects at the lake once the weather got warmer, especially the blackflies; the biting swarms hadn’t been locally dubbed “defenders of the wilderness” for nothing.
    I hoped Jemmy wouldn’t be there that long. We took the turn toward Eastport, Sam’s taillights glowing steadily ahead of us in the dark.
    “Wade… ”
    He glanced down at me, a smile crinkling the skin around his eyes, and gave my shoulder a squeeze.
    “Never mind,” I said at last.
    I’d already told him about seeing the ghost of my ex-husband in the kitchen—if that had been what it was, and not some goofy imagining of mine—and about the reason why Jemmy had come here at all, and about the hanged kid.
    Now I wanted to say I thought I might be in a mess, only I didn’t know what kind yet. But there was nothing anyone could do about any of it tonight, so instead we went home to bed. Wade, who’d been up for work at four the previous morning, was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
    I lay awake beside him thinking about Cory Trow and Sam. They were nearly the same age; I only hoped they wouldn’t end up similarly, hanging being just a quicker way to get where Sam was headed if something substantial didn’t change soon.
    Then I did sleep, tumbling into a nightmare: Sam, my father, Victor, and the hanged kid dancing on my roof, each with a noose end dangling in front of him like a loose necktie.
    Until they all vanished through trap doors, each soft-shoe routine ending suddenly in a short, sharp drop, a terminal snap.
     
     
    “Suicide, my ass,” Bella Diamond declared skeptically the next morning.
    Perched atop the washing machine, where I was tearing thick plastic sheets down from the windows—in winter my old kitchen was so cold that on some days the inside of that ancient refrigerator was warmer—I turned in surprise.
    Ordinarily my housekeeper wouldn’t say a bad word if she had a mouth full of them. “Cory Trow no more killed himself than I’m the Queen of Sheba,” she insisted while scrubbing feverishly at the kitchen sink.
    Bella was so emphatically not the Queen of Sheba that it was tragic. But I wanted that sink to retain at least a little of its remaining enamel.
    And what she’d said was what I thought, too. So I climbed down from the washing machine, took away her scrub rag, sat her at the table, and put one of the blueberry muffins she’d just baked plus a fresh cup of coffee in front of her. “How can you be so sure?”
    Morning sun glared in through the suddenly naked windows, covered all winter with those plastic sheets so heavy-duty they resembled waxed paper. I wasn’t even sure they kept the place any warmer, but at least they made me feel I was doing something to plug drafts.
    “Don’t take no genius,” Bella said scornfully. Then she told me why, whereupon I very nearly choked on my own muffin.
    “Married?” I