Chapter 1
“Tom, open up, his truck is still in the driveway and his inhaler is on your porch,” Clara called through the mahogany front door, rattling the brass handle. I froze on my knees in the dark foyer, both hands submerged in a bucket of steaming bleach. Beneath the gray foam, my fingers still gripped the heavy kitchen shears, their blades gummed with dried rust and shredded blue flannel. On the hardwood behind me, the violent red smear stretched from the vestibule into the crawlspace like a slaughtered animal had been dragged across the oak. “One minute, Clara,” I choked out, watching red water seep under the baseboard. “I spilled paint.”
“Tom? What paint? That doesn’t smell like paint!”
Her fist hit the solid wood again, rattling the deadbolt in its strike plate. Every thud vibrated through my skull like a mallet on wet bone.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My lungs were clamped shut against the fumes rising from the five-gallon mop bucket between my knees. The vapor burned my nostrils, hot and caustic, stinging the rims of my eyes until tears tracked down my stubble.
Under the gray, frothing scum of chlorinated water, the metal blades of the kitchen shears clicked against the plastic bottom.
*Drop them,* my brain screamed. *Take your hands out of the water.*
I pulled my arms free. Chemical heat bit into raw skin, turning my forearms the color of boiled shrimp. A greasy film of diluted crimson clung to my knuckles, running in pale pink rivulets down to my wrists. I wiped them frantically against my thighs, forgetting I was still in the gray sweatpants from last night. The fabric drank the bloody bleach, leaving dark, spreading halos across my knees.
“Tom! I know you’re in there. Your porch light is buzzing!”
“Just give me—give me thirty seconds, Clara!” My voice came out like gravel dragged across glass. I cleared my throat, forcing air into a chest that felt bound in rusted wire. “I knocked over a gallon of industrial primer in the utility hall. It’s got lacquer thinner in it. Don’t push the door, okay? You’ll track it everywhere.”
Silence hung on the other side of the mahogany. A heavy, suspicious silence that made the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“His truck is idling near the culvert,” she said, her voice muffled now, closer to the brass keyhole. “The driver’s door was hanging wide open. And his rescue inhaler—the red Ventolin canister he never leaves the house without—it was lying on your bottom step. Smashed. Tom, what is going on?”
My gaze dropped to the floorboards.
From the threshold of the foyer, running straight past the coat rack and disappearing around the corner into the pantry hallway, lay a violent, interrupted wake. It wasn’t a splash. Splashes have clean droplets, radiating outward like sunbursts. This was a drag mark. Two parallel troughs carved through a lake of drying, oxidized gore, as if a two-hundred-pound sack of wet meat had been hauled backward by someone whose heels couldn’t find purchase on the slick finish.
And at the center of that trail, caught on the sharp brass seam of the transition strip, was a three-inch shred of blue buffalo-plaid flannel. Marcus’s favorite shirt. The heavy wool was stiff, blackened around the frayed edges, and reeking of burnt hair and coppery rot.
*You lost your mind,* the voice whispered in my inner ear, cold and merciless. *The power died, the wind came screaming off the mountain, and when he came pounding on your glass, you finally snapped.*
“Tom?”
“I’m coming,” I wheezed.
I scrambled backward on my palms and knees, the wet oak squeaking beneath my weight. I grabbed the heavy Persian runner from the entryway—an antique wool rug my mother had left me, heavy enough to break an arm if dropped while rolled—and hurled it across the floor.
The carpet unrolled with a dull, heavy *flump*, smothering the dark smear just as the first drops of pink water crept toward the baseboards. I kicked the edges flat with my bare, trembling heels. It didn't cover the whole thing. The tail of the smear still hooked into the pantry, where the cellar access panel sat flush with the subfloor.
I grabbed a bottle of aerosol air freshener from the side table—some god-awful artificial pine scent—and held the nozzle down until a dense white fog hung in the vestibule, choking out the sharp tang of chlorine.
Then I unlocked the deadbolt, clicked the heavy safety chain into its slot, and cracked the heavy mahogany door four inches.
The morning air hit me like a slap. It was freezing, laden with the smell of wet pine needles, damp earth, and the charred, ozone stench of the fallen transformer down on Route 9. Fog clung to the hemlocks, thick and gray, swallowing the gravel driveway.
Clara stood on the porch, wrapped in an oversized shearling jacket that swallowed her small frame. Her blond hair was pulled back into a messy, sleep-flattened knot. Her eyes—wide, pale blue, rimmed with furious red veins—darted instantly from my face down to my bare, chemical-burned hands gripping the edge of the door.
“You look terrible,” she whispered.
“I was up all night with the storm,” I said, leaning my shoulder hard against the jamb to block the angle into the hallway. “The generator blew a circuit around one. I’ve been trying to keep the pipes from freezing ever since.”
She didn't blink. Her gaze stayed glued to my throat.
I realized, with a sickening drop in my stomach, that I hadn't looked in a mirror. I didn't know what was smeared across my jaw, or under my collarbones, or beneath my fingernails. I could feel a dried crust tightening the skin near my left ear.
“His truck,” she said again, pointing a trembling finger toward the driveway.
Through the gap between the porch posts, I could see it. Marcus’s battered Ford F-150 sat angled across the gravel apron, its front tires buried in the dead brush bordering my ditch. The headlights were still on, two weak, yellowish beams fading against the morning mist. The driver’s side door hung open, creaking faintly in the mountain breeze.
“I found this on your steps,” she said, her voice cracking.
She held out her mitten. Resting in the knit palm was a crushed cylinder of red plastic. The mouth guard had been snapped off; the aluminum canister inside was deeply dented, as if someone had ground it beneath the heel of a work boot.
My mouth went bone-dry.
“He didn’t come home last night, Tom.” Her voice dropped to a frantic, breathy pitch that set my teeth on edge. “He said he was coming over here. He said you two needed to settle the boundary timber once and for all before the surveyor came on Monday. He was furious. He took his keys, he slammed the porch door, and he walked out into that gale.”
A sharp spike of pain drilled through my temples, dragging up fragments of the dark.
*The sound of fists beating against the kitchen slider.* *The roar of the wind drowning out the screams.* *The kitchen table overturning with a deafening crash of shattered stoneware.*
