Chapter 2

*Marcus’s massive, flannel-clad silhouette lunging at me through the shadows, wheezing, choking, his hands clawing at my chest like a dying beast.* *The heavy, jagged iron weight in my grip—what had I picked up? The fire iron? The shears?* *The wet, sickening crack when metal met flesh.* *The terrible, bubbling whistle that followed, spraying hot mist across my face in the dark.*

I squeezed my eyes shut for a fraction of a second, fighting the bile climbing into my throat.

“He never made it inside, Clara,” I lied. The words tasted like cold lead. “I heard someone shouting out by the tree line around midnight, but the wind was howling so loud I thought it was branches snapping. When I looked out the kitchen window, the yard was pitch black. I didn't see anyone.”

“Then why was his inhaler on your bottom stair?” Her voice rose, hitting a shrill, hysterical frequency that seemed to echo off the damp pines. “Why would he drop it right outside your door? He can’t go ten minutes without it when the humidity drops! You know how bad his lungs are!”

“Maybe he slipped on the ice,” I said, keeping my tone flat, reasonable, the voice of a neighbor trying to calm a distraught wife. “The steps were glazed over by ten o’clock. If he fell, maybe he dropped it, got disoriented in the dark, and tried to walk back toward the road.”

She stared at me through the four-inch gap. Her breath plumed white between us, mingling with the sickening haze of pine aerosol and underlying bleach leaking from my foyer. She sniffed, her brow furrowing deeply.

“What is that smell?”

“Bleach and lacquer,” I said without missing a beat. “I told you. I dropped a can of primer when the breaker threw a spark. I’ve been cleaning it up so it doesn’t ruin the oak.”

“It smells like... copper,” she murmured, leaning an inch closer to the crack. “Like an abattoir.”

My fingers tightened on the edge of the heavy door until the wood groaned. Every instinct in my hindbrain was screaming at me to slam the door, throw the deadbolt, and run. But running was an admission. Running was a death sentence.

“It’s old paint, Clara,” I said, hardening my voice just enough to sound offended. “Look at me. I haven’t slept in thirty hours. If Marcus is out in the woods, standing here interrogating me isn’t helping him. Did you call the county?”

The question caught her off guard. Her eyes widened, a fresh wave of panic washing over the suspicion.

“The landlines are dead,” she stammered, pulling a cell phone from her coat pocket. The screen was black. “The cell tower on Blackwood Ridge lost its auxiliary power around three. I had one bar at dawn, and I managed to get a text through to Miller’s office before the battery gave out. He said he was heading out this way with a search unit as soon as they cleared the downed pines off the highway.”

*Deputy Miller.*

The name felt like a cold blade slipping between my ribs. Miller was Marcus’s second cousin. They hunted white-tail together every November in the hollows behind my ridge. If Miller brought a cruiser up that drive, he wouldn’t stay on the porch. He would push his way inside. He would look at the Persian runner. He would see the damp edges of the floorboards.

He would follow the smell.

“Miller’s coming?” I asked, keeping my face perfectly still.

“He should be here within the hour,” she said, her lower lip trembling violently. She looked back toward the tree line, where the dark pines stood like silent sentinels in the fog. “I’m going to walk the southern fence line. If he tripped... if he had an attack and went into the brush... he could be freezing to death right now.”

“Go,” I urged, leaning into the door. “Check the creek bed first. The wind blows down into the hollow; he might have sought shelter there. I’ll throw on some dry clothes, grab my heavy coat and a flashlight, and meet you by the culvert in ten minutes.”

She hesitated, her gaze lingering on the narrow slit of my foyer. Behind me, deep in the guts of the dark house, a pipe clanked in the crawlspace—a hollow, metallic shudder that sounded horrifically like a heel drumming against tin ductwork.

My heart seized.

Clara’s eyes darted past my shoulder. “What was that?”

“The furnace air locks,” I said instantly, raising my voice to drown out any further sound from the subfloor. “The pilot went out when the gas pressure dipped. Go, Clara! Every minute he’s out in this frost matters!”

That broke her paralysis. The maternal, protective terror for her husband overtook her doubt. She nodded jerkily, clutching the crushed inhaler to her chest, and turned away from the porch.

I watched her boots crunch through the wet gravel, heading toward the rear tree line, her shearling coat disappearing into the dense gray mist.

The moment she cleared the tailgate of Marcus’s idling truck, I slammed the mahogany door, threw the deadbolt, and leaned my forehead against the cold wood.

A dry heave tore through my chest. I doubled over, clutching my ribs, gasping for air that didn’t smell of synthetic pine and chemical death.

*One hour.*

I had less than sixty minutes before Deputy Miller’s cruiser crawled up that gravel drive.

I turned around to face the hallway.

In the pale, sickly light filtering through the high transom windows, the Persian runner looked like a grotesque joke. The antique fabric, saturated with dark liquid from beneath, was already blooming with deep, plum-colored stains along its fringe. The red water I had spilled had soaked through the underside, spreading wider, pooling in the grooves between the tongue-and-groove oak.

I ripped the runner aside.

The sight made my knees buckle.

It wasn't just blood. It was an entire anatomical disaster zone smeared across four yards of flooring.

Beside the puddle of gray mop water lay the items I had dragged out of the kitchen in my initial frenzy before Clara knocked.

First: the heavy, stainless-steel kitchen shears. Their eight-inch blades were notched near the hinge—the heavy-duty notch meant for severing poultry bone—and they were clogged with thick, jelly-like clots and fine, indigo-colored wool threads. The metal smelled foul, an eye-watering combination of singed meat and bile.

Second: two feet of clear, reinforced vinyl tubing, chopped roughly at both ends. It was the flexible tubing I kept on the utility pegboard for siphoning kerosene from the drums out back. The clear plastic was clouded, its inner lumen lined with dark, dried crust and frothy pink mucus, as if someone had tried to breathe through it—or choke on it—while their lungs filled with fluid.

Third: the shredded remnants of Marcus’s flannel shirt. It wasn't just torn; it had been hacked into jagged, frantic strips. The entire collar had been severed from the shoulders, the thick bone buttons sheared in half, the fabric soaked so heavily in dark venous blood that it felt heavy and cold as a dead fish when my fingers brushed against it.

*What did you do to him?* my mind screamed, the horror welling up so violently I could feel it buzzing in the roots of my teeth. *My God, Tom, what did you do with the shears?*

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