as she trudged to the kitchen. She couldn’t stand this cold, dark prison any longer. If she had a boat, she’d row down the river all the way to the ocean and let herself get swallowed by a whale.
Leaning against the sink, chugging glass after glass of water with shaky hands, she spotted a door on the landing at the bottom of the kitchen stairs, went down to it and turned the knob.
Locked.
She got the crowbar. Linda wouldn’t have approved but Linda wasn’t there. If Tereza left without seeing what was behind the door she’d always wonder. So what if it was something that killed her? She didn’t exactly have great plans for the future.
She broke open the door, fired up the flashlight and started down another set of stairs, swiping at cobwebs. The air smelled like a wet mop. A mouse scurried in front of her and disappeared into shadows. The basement was long and narrow, one half filled with crap, the other set up for some kind of meeting. On the crap side, dried-up plants hung from a clothesline strung beside a boiler. The boiler looked like a dead bug with four pipe legs reaching up into nowhere. She’d check out the boxes of junk cluttering the floor later. The other half of the room was squawking for attention.
A harp, like the one on the flask, leaned against a black-draped table in front of the black curtain and white pillars she and Linda had seen. The black hooded robe still dangled from a hook. Pinned to the curtain was a hand-drawn picture that looked like the one-celled creature Mr. Boynton had shown them under a microscope. Weird objects sat on the table just so. A metal goblet wearing a necklace of acorns and seashells. A creepy animal horn. A tall white candle. A wooden stick. A long piece of knotted yarn. A black-handled knife. Three jingle bells on a string. The stick, polished and tapered at the end, looked like a wand. Tereza picked it up, tapped the air and said, “Bibbidy bobbidi boo,” but she was still there, still pond-scum ugly. She lifted the knife and blew the dust off it. Its double-edged blade, six or seven inches long, fit in her pocketbook.
Ma claimed Tereza had ESP because she always knew when it was safe to come home. What if Miranda and Tereza were tuned to the same frequency? It would explain why Miranda had looked across to where Linda and Tereza were hiding the day the cops took her away and why Tereza had known she’d hole up in this house one day. The voice calling her yesterday could’ve been Miranda’s, the objects on the table a coded message.
Tereza had to break into the desk now. Miranda would want her to.
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