Chapter 6
“Deputy Miller stopped by the mill yesterday while you were in the back room pulling wallpaper samples,” David said softly.
Rachel’s heart skipped a beat. “Miller? Why?”
David stepped forward, taking both of her cold hands into his warm, sawdust-scented palms. “Elena was seen at the gas station near the valley crossroads on Monday night. She was asking the clerk if he knew where the ‘architect’s new place’ was. She told the clerk she had documents she needed to deliver to my new wife.”
The cold air in the hallway seemed to rush into Rachel’s lungs. “Documents? What documents?”
“More fabricated nonsense,” David said, his jaw tightening with controlled disgust. “Medical bills. Forged emails. The usual smear material she uses to terrorize anyone who tries to build a life with me. Miller warned her that crossing the ridge boundary violates the county harassment decree, but she’s escalating, Rae. When women like Elena realize they’ve lost their target, they don't retreat. They seek to poison the well.”
He squeezed her hands, his eyes blazing with an intense, fierce protection that made her breath catch. “I won't let her touch you, Rachel. I won't let her poison your mind the way she tried to poison my town. This house is a sanctuary. As long as these bolts are thrown, nothing from her diseased world can reach you.”
Rachel looked at the three heavy locks, the polished brass catching the dim light of the hallway fixture. It looked like an armory door.
“What about the windows?” she asked quietly.
“I installed tamper-proof steel sash pins on every ground-floor casing this morning while you were sleeping,” David answered, a note of quiet pride in his tone. “And I wired the secondary motion sensors along the rear timberline. If anything larger than a stray fox breaks the beam within fifty yards of the clearing, the perimeter floods will trip, and the master console by our bed will chime.”
Later that afternoon, while David was out behind the woodshed splitting red oak for the evening fire, Rachel carried a basket of freshly laundered linens down the hall toward the guest bedroom.
Near the baseboard beside the linen press, her foot caught against something small and white.
She knelt down. It was a blank telephone jack plate, loose against the baseboard. David had mentioned on their wedding day that he had decided against running a landline up the mountain to spare the hemlocks. But this plate wasn't new—it was an older, cream-colored modular jack that had clearly been installed decades ago by the previous owners.
Curious, Rachel used the tip of her thumbnail to pry the plastic cover back.
Inside the wall cavity, four thin copper wires—red, green, yellow, black—hung suspended in the dust.
They hadn't been disconnected at the exterior pole.
They hadn't been pulled loose by an aging foundation.
Each of the four copper strands had been cleanly, surgically severed with a pair of diagonal wire cutters. The copper ends were flush, shiny, bright and un-oxidized—cut within the last few weeks. And to ensure they couldn't be spliced, the wire bundle had been pushed back through a newly drilled hole into the subfloor, disappearing into the dark crawlspace beneath the foundation.
Rachel stared at the sheared copper tips.
*Copper doesn't stay bright orange after five years in a damp wall,* she thought, her pulse suddenly hammering in her ears. *Those were cut this month.*
From the woodshed outside, the sharp, rhythmic crack of the splitting maul echoed across the clearing.
*Crack.*
*Thud.*
Rachel quickly snapped the plastic plate back against the baseboard, stood up with the basket of linen, and backed out of the hallway, her breath coming fast and shallow.
***
Day fourteen arrived with a dead, suffocating sky. The cloud cover hung so low over the valley that the tops of the white pines were lost in a gray void.
Rachel woke before the alarm. Beside her, David slept deeply, his breathing heavy and regular, one massive arm thrown across her waist, pinning her to the mattress with the weight of an oak beam.
Carefully, sliding her hips an inch at a time, Rachel slipped out from beneath his arm. She didn't put on her slippers; she moved in her bare feet across the hand-scraped floorboards, avoiding the third plank near the armoire that she had learned groaned under weight.
She pulled on her heavy wool cardigan over her linen nightshirt and walked down the quiet stairs.
The foyer smelled faintly of gun oil and new brass. She unlocked the top deadbolt, the secondary mortise lock, and then the long, five-sided industrial deadbolt, each mechanism turning with a smooth, oiled precision that produced almost no sound.
She pushed the heavy front door open, stepping out onto the wide fir porch to draw a breath of the frigid mountain air.
Her bare foot stopped halfway to the timber boards.
A dark shape hung from the carved balustrade at the far end of the porch steps.
Rachel took two hesitant, trembling steps forward, clutching the cardigan tightly over her collarbones.
It was a mountain thrush.
The bird was suspended upside-down by its yellow legs, tied to the wooden railing with a piece of dark green, braided nylon twine. Its gray-brown wings were pinned against its torso, its head lolling limp, the black beak crusted with dried, dark fluid. Beneath the bird’s hanging beak, three jagged slash marks were gouged into the soft fir of the handrail, raw wood fibers splintered against the dark stain.
Rachel’s hand flew to her mouth, stifling a scream.
Then she looked past the railing, toward the gravel turnaround where her dead Subaru sat parked beside David’s Wagoneer.
Both rear tires of the Crosstrek were completely flat, the rubber collapsed into wide, black puddles against the crushed river stone.
“David!” she cried out, her voice cracking against the quiet woods. “David, wake up!”
The sound of heavy, rapid footsteps pounded down the timber stairs inside. Three seconds later, David burst through the front door, wearing only his flannel trousers and a gray undershirt, holding a short-barreled 12-gauge shotgun in his right hand.
His eyes were wide, feral with adrenaline. “Rae! What is it? Did you see someone?”
Rachel couldn't speak. She pointed a trembling finger toward the balustrade, then toward the car.
David’s gaze followed her hand. He lowered the shotgun instantly, his jaw setting into a hard, white line. He stepped past her onto the cold porch, kneeling beside the hanging bird. His face was an unreadable mask of cold, vibrating fury.
“Stay inside,” David commanded, his voice dropping into a harsh, razor-sharp whisper. “Don't touch anything. Go into the kitchen and lock the back door. Now, Rachel!”
Rachel stumbled back into the foyer, her heart thumping violently against her ribs. She didn't retreat to the kitchen. Instead, she stood just inside the open front door, watching through the narrow sidelight as David walked down the steps into the gravel.
He inspected the tires of her car, his hands on his hips, his head tilted back toward the canopy of hemlocks as if scanning the ridge for shadows. He pulled a radio from his back pocket—the county emergency band he kept tuned to the sheriff’s dispatch—and clicked the transmitter.
