Chapter 3
The blackout had unleashed something monstrous. I remembered the rage—the months of bitter feuding over the two acres of timber Marcus claimed belonged to his family’s original homestead, the petty threats, the dead dog he swore I poisoned, the midnight screaming matches by the mailbox. When the storm had plunged the valley into total, suffocating darkness, the boundary line had dissolved. He had come into my home to settle it with his fists. And I...
I had slaughtered him like an animal in a slaughterhouse chute.
I dropped to my knees, ignoring the sting of bleach soaking through my sweatpants.
“Think,” I muttered through chattering teeth. “Think, damn you. Clear the trail.”
I grabbed the plastic mop bucket, hoisted the sloshing, foul-smelling gray water, and dumped it directly over the darkest portion of the smear. The liquid hissed against the oak, foaming as it met the coagulated protein.
Using an old push broom from the coat closet, I began to scrub with frantic, violent strokes. The bristles threw dirty pink droplets against the white baseboards, against the floral wallpaper, against the brass umbrella stand.
*Shit. Stop. Don't splatter it!*
I threw down the broom, grabbed an armful of old bath towels from the linen hamper, and threw my entire body weight onto them, dragging them back and forth across the floorboards. The terrycloth drank the red slurry, turning heavy and purple.
Every stroke revealed the trail leading deeper into the house.
It went past the coat rack. Past the small telephone table. Right to the entrance of the pantry.
In the center of the pantry floor, surrounded by shelves of canned peaches and dry beans, was the square wooden hatch. It measured three feet by three feet, cut directly into the subfloor, with a recessed iron ring that allowed access to the unheated crawlspace beneath the house.
The hatch was slightly ajar.
A dark, sticky smear ran down the exposed pine edge of the frame, pooling on the top rung of the wooden ladder that descended into the blackness below.
Down there, the earth was cold, damp clay. The clearance was barely four feet—a maze of rusted galvanized pipes, yellow fiberglass insulation sagging from the floor joists, and sheet-metal ventilation ducts that fed the floor registers above.
Down there was where I had shoved the heavy, limp deadweight in the pitch-black panic of three in the morning.
I crawled to the edge of the open hatch and stared down into the abyss.
A cold draft drifted up, carrying a stench that made my stomach heave again. It didn't smell like the bleach upstairs. It smelled of raw earth, singed rubber, scorched electrical wire, and the sweet, cloying rot of a punctured human body.
And then, from somewhere deep in the darkness of the crawlspace—thirty feet back, near the main galvanized return duct—I heard it again.
A faint, wet, dragging rustle.
Followed by the dull, metallic *tink* of sheet metal flexing under shifting weight.
The sound froze the blood in my veins.
*He’s dead,* I told myself, clutching the edge of the subfloor until splinters drove under my fingernails. *He has to be dead. Nobody loses that much blood and lives. The shears... the throat... you felt him go limp.*
The memory hit me with sudden, visceral cruelty: kneeling over Marcus in the pitch black of the kitchen, the floor slick as ice, my hands slippery with hot fluid, feeling his chest convulse once, twice, a horrific, rattling wheeze tearing out of his ruined windpipe, before his massive frame collapsed into dead, inert gravity.
I had dragged him here. I had hauled him by the armpits, his boots thumping down the cellar steps, his flannel catching on the hatch hinge, and I had dumped him into the dirt like a bag of lime.
If something was moving down there, it wasn't Marcus.
It was rats. Or the wind whistling through the foundation vents. Or the house settling under the weight of the snow and freezing rain.
*Or he’s dying down there,* a small, terrified voice whispered. *And every second you spend covering your tracks, he’s suffocating in the dark.*
No. If he was alive, he would scream. He would curse me. He would call for Clara.
There was only silence now. A thick, heavy, suffocating silence punctuated only by the distant drip of water from an uninsulated pipe.
I backed away from the hatch, my chest heaving.
*I have to destroy the evidence. All of it.*
The kitchen shears. The severed tubing. The blood-soaked rags. The flannel strips.
If Deputy Miller saw any of this, there would be no explanation. No story about spilled paint or fallen trees could account for bone-notched shears crusted with flesh and a kitchen floor washed in human blood.
I scrambled back to the foyer, gathering the incriminating debris into the center of a heavy canvas drop cloth.
I threw the shears into the center. Their metal blades clicked against the floor, splattering a final drop of dark crimson onto my wrist.
I threw the severed plastic tube on top of them. Looking at the tube made my skin crawl; the ragged, chewed ends looked like they had been forced into an opening far too small for them, the plastic buckled and stained with dark fluid.
I grabbed the strips of Marcus’s blue shirt. As I lifted them, something heavy fell from the folds of the flannel and hit the hardwood with a sharp, plastic clatter.
I froze.
Sitting on the floor was a small, black rectangular device, no larger than a deck of cards. Its digital display was spiderwebbed with deep cracks, the casing smeared with greasy soot and blood. On the side, a tiny toggle switch was jammed into the *RECORD* position, though the crushed LED screen was completely dark.
I picked it up with trembling fingers.
It was an old voice recorder—the rugged kind Marcus carried in his breast pocket to take notes on timber yields and property markers.
Had it been running?
Had he been recording our confrontation? Had he turned it on before he kicked my door in, hoping to catch me making threats about the boundary fence?
A cold sweat broke out across my ribs, soaking through my undershirt. If that device had captured last night—if it held the audio of our struggle, the breaking glass, the wet, butchering sounds of what I had done to him—then it was the final nail in my coffin.
I shoved the crushed recorder deep into my sweatpants pocket.
*The lye,* I thought, the realization hitting me with sudden, sharp clarity. *The two bags of industrial lye in the tool shed.*
I had bought them in the spring to clear the root systems choking the septic line. Concentrated sodium hydroxide. Enough to dissolve organic matter down to sterile sludge in twenty-four hours.
I wrapped the canvas drop cloth tightly around the shears, the bloody towels, and the shredded flannel, tying the corners into a desperate, bulky knot.
Outside, far down the valley, a low, mechanical growl echoed through the bare pines.
It wasn't Marcus’s truck.
It was the heavy, four-wheel-drive rumble of a county patrol vehicle, its tires grinding through the slush on the lower switchbacks of Ridge Road.
