"About a mile."
"All right. While you walk, tell me what you found in--"
"Actually, now's not a good time," I said, staring up at another window I'd never fit through. "I'll call you back."
TC meowed. Loudly. It echoed through the empty basement.
"Where are you, Olivia?"
"Can I call--?"
TC began scratching at a different closed door. While yowling.
"Olivia. Where--?"
"On my way home. Soon." I checked the room where TC had been scratching. One window. No bigger than the rest. I closed the door again. "I've just . . . I've had a setback. Can I just call you--?"
"You'
re not outside, are you?"
I sighed. "No, okay? I'm . . . I found TC in the basement of an abandoned house. Well, I'm not sure you'd call it abandoned--it's just not being lived in. I'm having trouble getting out of the basement."
"Trouble?"
The cat sat on the bottom step, looking up at me, silent now.
"I went downstairs, and I must have closed the door, but it won't open. It doesn't seem to be locked, but I can't get it--"
"You're chatting with me about work when someone has locked you in a basement?"
"You were chatting about work. I was looking for an exit. And no one has me locked--"
"The door mysteriously closes behind you and won't reopen?"
"I might have closed it, like I said. There's no one here. The place is so quiet I'd hear a mouse scampering."
A ding sounded at the other end of the line. Then the familiar whoosh of a closing elevator door.
"Where are you?" I asked carefully.
"Coming to get you."
"No, no, no. Go back up to your condo. I'm fine."
"You're locked in the basement of an empty house, not even a week after being knocked out by someone who left a severed head in your bed. Also after repeatedly seeing a fetch--"
"It wasn't a fetch. Rose thinks . . . Never mind. The point is--"
"The point is that you are trapped in a basement." His footsteps echoed. Parking garage.
"And you are an hour away."
"If I drove the speed limit. Which I do not."
I sighed. "I'm fine, Gabriel. If I really can't get out, my phone obviously works. I can call the police."
"After breaking into an empty house?"