Behind Closed Doors

Grace strategizes about how she will give Jack the pills. One of many problems is that she does not know how many it will take to put him to sleep, or how soon the effects will take hold. She thinks that she might be able to get them into one of his nightly drinks.

As part of her plan, Grace begins refusing food. Days later, when Jack asks if she is on a hunger strike, Grace says that she is depressed because she knows there is no way to save Millie or herself. There is a glass of wine on the tray of food Jack has brought up, and Grace asks if she can have a whiskey with her dinner instead. Though he didn’t think she drank whiskey, Jack gets her one. She tells him that she thought it might kickstart her appetite.

Grace has never actually had whiskey, and the first taste is a shock. Even so, she knocks back the rest so that Jack believes that she likes it. She only eats half of her food. The next day, when she doesn’t eat again, Jack says that he is cancelling tomorrow’s visit with Millie. He asks whether she is trying to get him to cancel Millie’s birthday party the weekend after. Grace goes with it and says that she doesn’t want Millie to fall in love with the house. In any case, Grace might be too weak to go to the party. Jack says that she better eat. Grace says that she will if he gives her a whiskey with dinner to help with her appetite. Grace realizes his need to keep her healthy outweighs his desire to punish her. She hopes her plan will continue to work.

Grace is waiting in front of their house with her suitcase. Esther pulls up. She is taking Grace to the airport. Grace tells Esther that it was so nice of her to pick her up on such short notice. Then she reveals that Jack lost his court case and he is really beating himself up over it. He has a lot of paperwork to catch up on and will join her after four days or so. He probably won’t pick up his phone while he’s catching up on work, so Esther shouldn’t feel obligated to invite him to dinner. The conversation is flowing easily, and Grace begins to relax a bit. Esther gets her to the airport with minutes to spare, and Grace waits for her flight to board.

Grace notes, “Until the day of Millie’s party, I never really thought I would kill Jack” (245). When he mentioned taking Grace and Millie to New Zealand, Grace knew that the only answer was to kill him because once Jack tells all of their friends that Millie and Grace decided to stay in New Zealand, there won’t be any way out. After the party, Jack says that they were never going to New Zealand; it will just be a cover story while he hides them in the house. He says that instead of explain their disappearance to her parents, he will likely just kill her mother and father. Jack said it was very difficult for him to let Millie leave after the party, and as soon as they return from Thailand, he will have her move in. Grace knows she will have to kill Jack before the trip.

Up in her room, Grace asks Jack to stay and have a drink with her, once he brings up the whiskey. She says that she’s lonely, bored and going crazy. Perhaps lonely himself, he comes back with two glasses of whiskey.

After they talk and Jack leaves, Grace tests a few of the pills. She grinds four into a powder and uses the top of her shampoo bottle as a cup. After fifteen minutes, Grace falls asleep and sleeps for fourteen hours. The other sixteen probably won’t be enough to kill him. She will have to find a way to kill him after he is unconscious.

She continues her strategy of having whiskey in the evenings and asks Jack to join her. It turns out that he needs someone to vent to about the Tomasin case, which has turned out to be more difficult and lengthy than he imagined.

On the night before they’re supposed to leave for Thailand, Jack tells Grace to drink her whiskey quickly because she has to pack. Grace didn’t think they were going because it seemed like the case was dragging on and on. However, it turns out that the jury has been deliberating for two days and should be coming back with the verdict tomorrow. Grace will have to kill Jack the next day, when he comes home from court. That night, Grace worries about how she will pull off the murder, and then she realizes she has figured out not only a way to kill him, but to get away with it.

Grace is on an airplane alone. She is worried about Jack catching her, but she knows that he can’t get to Thailand before she does. When she arrives at the hotel in Bangkok, she tells the hotel manager, Mr. Ho, that work has kept Jack in England, but he will arrive soon.

Once in the room, Grace calls Jack and leaves him “the sort of message a loving wife would leave, the sort of message [she] might have left had [she] been able to carry on living the dream” (256). Then she calls Janice and checks in on Millie. She orders room service, but is at first afraid to step out into the hall to get it. When she finally works up the courage, she wishes she had ordered a bottle of wine so that she could celebrate her achievement. Then she reminds herself that in five days, she can really relax.

In the morning, Grace calls Jack again and leaves him another message. She tells him that she misses him and that he can reach her by the pool. She wonders how she will spend the next two days, and when Mr. Ho suggests that she go on an overnight tour that gets back the night before Jack is supposed to arrive, it sounds perfect to Grace.

On the trip, she meets a middle-aged couple, Margaret and Richard, with whom she becomes friends. They invite Grace and Jack to have dinner with them once Jack arrives. When she gets back late at night, she leaves Jack another message, more insistent this time, and with a more worried tone. She waits half an hour and tries him again. Grace then calls again after another half hour has passed.

After that, Grace calls Jack’s office and asks for Adam. She tells Adam that she hasn’t been able to get in touch with Jack and is getting worried. Adam says that he didn’t even know that Jack wasn’t in Thailand. Grace acts confused, saying that Jack told her that Adam offered to take Jack to the airport. Adam offers to contact some friends and see if they’ve heard from Jack. Adam quickly calls back and says that no one talked to Jack over the weekend, but he assumes Jack just forgot to switch his cell phone back on. He should be in Thailand the next morning. Grace asks for Adam’s number in case she has to get in touch.

The next day, Grace waits for Jack in the lobby. Mr. Ho sees that Jack’s flight is delayed. When she waits for two more hours and he still has not arrived, she uses the lobby phone to leave him a worried message. She goes to lunch with the couple she met on the excursion and continues to leave messages for Jack.

Jack has still not arrived by the next morning, and at the urging of her new friend Margaret, Grace calls the British Embassy, to see if Jack was on the flight. It turns out that he wasn’t. Grace calls Adam, who offers to go to the house and check on Jack, but of course he cannot get in. Grace then comes to the conclusion that Jack must have gotten into a car accident on the way to the airport.

Adam calls the next day to say that he cannot find Jack and has contacted the police and with Grace’s permission they can break into the house. Hours later, there is a knock on the door of her hotel room. It’s two diplomats from the British Embassy. They come in and urge Grace to sit down. One of them tells Grace that Jack has been found dead. Grace asks if Jack was in a car crash on the way to the airport. The senior diplomat tells Grace that Jack “took his own life” (275). 

Grace has determined that she can “get away with murder”; she just has to figure out the details (276). Her plan hinges on whether Jack wins or loses the Tomasin case. If he loses, he might drink with her in her bedroom to bemoan his bad break. If he wins, she will have to try to drug him anyway, either at the house or on the plane. She has learned from Jack to plan for every possible outcome.

The day Jack is supposed to hear the verdict, Grace crushes the pills into a powder and hides the dust in a square of toilet paper that she puts up her sleeve. When he comes home, she hears him downstairs making two drinks. As he comes upstairs, she begins to rub her left eye so that it looks red. He opens the bedroom door and tells her that he lost the case.

Grace tells Jack that she has something in her eye and asks him to help her get it out. As he looks, she works the toilet paper from her sleeve into the palm of her hand. She drops the powder into the glass that she’s holding. When he has to look at her eye more closely, she says that she can hold his glass. When he can’t find anything in her eye, she gives him her glass. When Grace asks what they should drink to, Jack says, “‘Revenge’” (278). Grace then “raise[s] the glass [she is] holding. ‘To revenge, then.’ [She] knock[s] half of the whiskey back and [she is] gratified to see him doing the same’” (278). While Grace wonders how long it will take the pills to work, Jack tells her that the best part of his job is imagining that he is the one who beat the women. Hearing this, she throws her remaining whiskey into his face.

He moves toward her, but his eyes are closed because of the whiskey, giving her time to push him. Grace runs out of the bedroom and down the stairs. She hides in the wardrobe. Afraid there is an outside key and he might be able to lock her in, she bursts out and falls at Jack’s feet. He yanks her up by her hair. Grace pleads with him not to take her to the basement. This bit of reverse psychology works and he begins to take her there. She fights against him, making him expend energy to get her there.

When they reach the basement room, Grace manages to pull Jack down by the knees and onto the floor. The pills are beginning to work and with his reaction time slowed, he lies on the floor for a few seconds longer than normal. Grace runs out of the room and pushes the door closed.

After getting their glasses from the bedroom, Grace goes to the kitchen and washes them out while she can hear Jack banging on the door below. She goes back upstairs and puts her clothes in his room, making it look like she had been staying there all along. She goes to his study and finds her passport on his desk, as well as an envelope with Thai currency. She riffles through his jacket and takes £200 from his wallet, as well as one of his business cards for calling his office.

It is already 4:30pm and her flight is at 7pm. Grace realizes that she didn’t really plan out how she would get to the airport and she doesn’t know any taxi service numbers. She calls Esther. She tells her that Jack is staying behind for a few days and he can’t take her to the airport because he has been drinking. She asks Esther whether she has any numbers for taxi services. Esther insists on taking Grace to the airport herself. Grace is unsure how she’s going to be able to pretend that all is well. 

Grace is on a plane heading back to England. She thinks about what she should say. Whatever she chooses to reveal to Diane and Adam, who are supposed to pick her up from the airport, she has to be very careful, because she will have to repeat it verbatim to the police. Grace hopes that the police haven’t flagged Jack’s death as being suspicious. She has to convince everyone that the stress of losing his first case was enough motivation for Jack to kill himself. She considers telling the police that she knew about the basement, and saying it was Jack’s space for getting ready to do battle in court.

When Grace exits passport control, it’s not Diane and Adam who are waiting for her, but Esther. Esther suggests they get a cup of coffee before driving back to the house so that they can wait out traffic. While Esther gets the coffees, Grace wonders if Esther is suspicious about Jack’s death and if she will try to blackmail Grace. Instead, Esther tells Grace that Jack died of dehydration. He did not take enough pills to overdose, but could not get any water because he had locked himself in the basement. It was a painful death that took four days.

Esther begins to coach Grace about what she should say to the police. Grace is surprised at first, but begins to go along with it. She should tell the police that he thought his career was over and that he “‘couldn’t stand failure’” (290). The pills were over-the-counter pills that he knew about because they were the ones Millie was taking. Esther suggests that Grace should say that she knew about the basement room. Esther isn’t sure how Grace should explain the fact that the room was painted entirely red and that portraits of battered women were hung on the walls. Grace mentions her thought about stating that the basement was a study where he prepared for his stressful cases. However, she will say that she never saw the paintings. Esther advises Grace to play on her supposed mental fragility. Then Esther corroborates that she and Grace were the last people to see Jack alive because she saw him wave goodbye to them from his study window. Grace agrees: “The enormity of what [Esther is] doing, of what she’s offering to do, hits me and I feel myself starting to shake. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper” (293). Grace asks Esther how she knew. Esther says that Jack’s misstep of twice referring to Millie’s room as red gave her the clue she needed. Grace is finally free.