Whether he intended me to see it or not, the barrel of a rifle slipped out from under the right side of his coat, then disappeared again within the folds. The woman beside him kept her gaze fixed on the cobblestone path at my back.
I turned, found the steps behind me, and climbed out of the pool. I walked around the edge toward them both, shivering as the night air found my wet skin.
“You’ll find everything you need in there,” the man said, nodding toward the pool house behind him. “You’ve got one minute.”
The pool house was a little larger than our living room, about the size of a small hotel room. A queen-size bed filled one wall. A dresser, a small desk, and a single chair lined the others. A door at the back opened into a bathroom. The bare walls were painted a muted white, and the floors were some kind of dark hardwood. Heavy drapes covered all the windows. I pulled a thick, white towel from a shelf near the door and dried off. Atop the bed, I found a white button-down shirt, khaki pants, socks, underwear, and a pair of black loafers, all new, still tagged and in the packaging, all in my size.
“Let’s go,” the man said outside the door.
I quickly dressed, then stepped back outside.
“This way,” he said, and I followed with the woman behind me, my eyes drifting over Stella’s damp footprints on the cobblestone, glistening under the twinkling lights.
Although lamps burned inside the house, dark shadows pushed the light aside from all corners like living, breathing creatures defending what was rightfully theirs. The man led me back through the central corridor from earlier, then turned left down another hallway. Paintings covered the walls, landscapes of places I had never been—forests and deserts, lakes and oceans, the large redwood trees and fields of grass. They were all signed by Stella, and I couldn’t help but think of my own drawings, all those sketches of her—my obsession. And these other places, these far-off places, were hers.
We turned left at the end of another hallway, then came to a staircase of stone. Light from the hallway spilled over, and a dim bulb burned at the very bottom, leaving the space between in deep grays.
The man started down the steps, and when I hesitated at the top, I felt a nudge at my back from the female sentry. “Go.”
The temperature seemed to drop with each step, and by the time we reached the bottom, I was shivering again. At the base of the stairs stood a small alcove, no more than eight feet square with walls made of stacked limestone. A hallway branched off both to the left and the right. We went down the right and came upon a small room with a large, steel door at the back. Beside the door was a wooden table with a small television sitting on top, the wires attached to some kind of junction box and trailing off into the stone wall.
I heard footsteps behind us and turned to find Stella coming down the hallway, still in the thin white robe, her feet bare, her hands back in gloves, with Ms. Oliver keeping pace behind her. When Stella saw me, she slowed, then stopped, her eyes locking with mine. “I don’t want him here,” she said to Oliver.
“This isn’t your call,” Oliver said.
“You can’t make me.”
“I can, and I will if I must. Do you really want to test me?”
Stella’s eyes dropped to the floor, then back to me. Large and sad. “I don’t want him to see,” she said softly. “Not him.”
“That is precisely why he needs to be here. You’ve lost focus,” Oliver said. She nodded toward the man in white beside me. “Open the door.”
The man reached to the large steel door, took hold of the handle, and pulled it open. The door must have been three inches thick and opened with the slow heaviness of a bank vault, the weight grinding on ancient hinges.
Behind the door, in the center of the room, was a metal folding chair. Sitting in the folding chair was a man in a black tee-shirt, leather jacket, and dark jeans, his face lost beneath a white hood. Several gold chains dangled from his neck. Hanging from the thickest was a gold dagger. His feet were bound to the base of the chair, and his hands were tied behind him. At the sound of the door opening, he faced in our general direction, but I couldn’t tell if he could actually see us through the hood. “Let me the fuck out of here!” he shouted.
He shifted his weight back and forth, and the chair bounced under him, the legs scratching at the stone. “I’ll kill every one of you motherfuckers!”
“Now, Stella,” Oliver said.
“No.”
“Now. Or it will be your boyfriend instead.”
I forced myself to look away from the man in the room and turned back to Stella. Her gloved hands gripped the fabric of her robe tightly, kneading the material with an anxiety that was only matched by the mix of anger and fear on her face. She glared at Oliver, and at that moment, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Stella were to reach up and strangle the woman with those gloved hands.
Oliver stood her ground, though, unflinching. “Go.”
Stella drew in a deep breath, nodded, and stepped into the small room.
The man in white closed the heavy door behind her, twisting the lock into place.
I didn’t know what was to come, couldn’t possibly know, but I wanted to put an end to it. Whatever was about to happen.
Ms. Oliver crossed the room and switched on the small television on the table. There was an audible pop as the screen came to life and filled with an image of the room behind the door, the man in the chair, and Stella standing before him, removing her gloves.
Stella removed first her right glove, then her left, dropping them both on the floor beside her bare feet. She glanced up at the camera in the top corner of the room, then turned to the man in the chair. She reached for his hood and plucked it off.
