Some threats aren't just texts. They’re a death sentence.
It was 9:30 by the time they called it quits.
Frowning, Paula said, “Dammit. I’m sorry for keeping you so late. I was sure it would work.” She flopped down into her desk chair in the cubicle across from Eric’s. The office was mostly empty that late on a Friday, leaving him and Paula to run a finicky engineering trial for a product that had already been on the market for a decade. She pulled her auburn bun free, and her eyes sagged as she yawned.
Eric smirked. “We’ll get it, Paula.” He tapped his keyboard, awakening his computer. “Probably just need to sleep on it is all. The patent isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.”
“Yeah. Tell Alicia that. She’s going to bust a tit. Tuesday this, critical path that… Blah, blah, blah.” Paula tossed her safety glasses onto the desk. “She only seems to remember the mistakes, none of the accomplishments.”
Eric hummed. Having been on his manager’s bad side once or twice throughout his tenure, he said, “Yeah, I’ll let you handle that one.”
They laughed as he pulled his phone from his desk drawer, aiming to put on some email-checking symphony; violins had been strumming in his head all day. But his face fell. The number of notifications looked foreign on his screen: 100 missed calls, 108 text messages. He flicked his eyes. All this drama over grabbing Sarah from cheer practice? God, the one night that I take for myself, the damn household implodes. He punched in the twins’ birth date to unlock the screen.
Nicole and the kids had texted incessantly. Even Dad had called. Texted. All missed because of the failed trial. Eric’s gut sank to his feet as he read the latest message that came through not even a minute ago from Nicole:
Eric where are you! This isn’t a joke!
Deafened to Paula’s follow-up questions, Eric forced out a shallow breath and called her.
Nicole answered on the first ring, something that she’d never done. He didn’t get her voicemail. No. No flippant, “I’m in a meeting with Chinaaaa; call you back!” No. His wife breathed hard into the receiver; then she wept, stumbling over words.
“Nicole, baby, what’s wrong?” he asked, trying and failing to match her frantic with his faux calm.
“I ca—I can—” she stammered, wet words tripping over tears and breath and—
“Nicole, talk!” he shouted. He froze, anticipating something… something… He broke free of his trance and stood. Paula’s brow dragged as she watched.
Clattering on the line.
“Dad?”
“Sarah?” Sarah, the older of his twin daughters. A sigh of relief escaped his lungs as his ears perked, ready for the family’s skilled messenger to speak. “What happened?” Eric snatched his suitcase from underneath his desk and threw the strap over his shoulder. He rushed through the sea of cubicles, stomping along in his work-issued steel-toed boots and smeared safety glasses, undone lab coat fluttering in his haste.
“This is Sam.” Her sullen whisper was buried underneath a battle with tears, something he hadn’t heard from the younger of the twins since she had been afraid of the dark. She left the hysterics to Sarah, Bri, EJ, and Nicole.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. Of course it was Sam. Sarah and Bri were the only ones that still called him Daddy. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Tell me what’s going on,” Eric said as he stormed through the door; the fall air washed the sweat forming on his brow. He forced his suitcase open, dug for the keys.
“Sarah. She-she’s—” Sam sobbed, words soaked in reserved tears. Nicole’s gut-wrenching cries rang through the receiver and Eric’s guts twisted.
He hopped into the SUV. The parking lot went blurry as he looked over his shoulder to back out. “She what?” he asked through a shaken throat. He gripped the steering wheel, not knowing where to go, what to do—
“She’s dead, Dad.”
Part 1: Five Years Gone
Chapter 1
Eric sighed and poked the password into his phone: 062806; the twins’ birthday, although there was only one twin left. Jitters crawled around his gut as frantic eyes scanned the newest image on his phone screen. He’d changed his number eight times, and still they messaged. In the latest image, he—or his severed head—sat on a picnic table. Red tendrils swiveled from the opening at the base of his neck. Dried coppery blood painted his chin like a patchy beard. His dark hair was untouched, combed back as it was in most of his photos on his now deactivated social media accounts. You forgot to add my glasses this time, he thought. A family gathered around a tan picnic table, his lone head the gruesome centerpiece. They talked and laughed, blood barely dry on the camouflage of their collective uniforms. The familiar faces looked happier than they had when he’d last seen them in living color; the courtroom had been chaotic that day.
“The two-track is coming soon, right?” Paula asked, tearing Eric’s eyes away from the disturbance on his screen. Her bubbly smile was as big as the sunglasses that sat across her face. Eric nodded.
Paula, who’d navigated for the last three hours, couldn’t help but crack small inside jokes or gossip about the office. Things they’d shared. Half-interested, Eric nodded along and trained his eyes on the thin gray birch trunks as they flung by. Fallen leaves, golden as the sun, pink as petunias, orange and brown like rust, piled up on the ground and skittered across the road. The wooden expanse went for miles, giving the forest’s secret depths privacy, making everything hiding within invisible to the narrow highway.
Eric bent an index finger, nudged his wired frames up the bridge of his nose. The sun had begun its descent, painting the smooth road gold. He yawned, meaning to catch a nap; he hadn’t slept for shit last night. If he wasn’t obsessing over listing and relisting the things-to-do before closing on the cabin, he was deleting a barrage of texts from another unknown number. He was grateful for the wilderness outside and the faint signal he’d get for the next two days.
The angry family, Eaton Keen’s family, wouldn’t find Eric there.
Eric peered over his shoulder, not finding the evergreen pickup doggedly following them—that insufferable shadow that tracked Eric from the store to Paula’s and to work. But there was nothing back there but the autumn-riddled road.
“Ah, here it is,” Paula said. “I see it.” Eric didn’t need to look up to see it: the tree with the heart engraved on it. Next to it was the mouth of the two-track.
She slowed down, craned her neck to see.
Eric’s heart danced in his chest, this being the second time he’d taken this ride with Paula.
She hung a left onto Brennan Drive. The rumble of pebbles and uneven land grated at the bottom of the Tahoe, piling filth onto the pearly white exterior. Paula patted his thigh, then ran a soothing hand over it. “I’m excited to meet the kids.” She squeezed.
He gave a half-smile as another text flashed across the screen, ending the screed of threats the same way Eaton’s family always had: The courts failed, but we won’t. Eye for an eye. One of yours will die.
Eric sighed, rolled his eyes. Yeah, sure, asshole. He deleted that message too. One catastrophic step at a time, Eric reminded himself, but his heart only throbbed harder.
Paula rocked her shoulders, getting all bouncy the way she did when she made a breakthrough in the lab or when she was prepping for a ten-mile run. “Eric, are you ready? Huh? Huh? Huh?” she sang, full lips pressing together before she sucked them in. Dimples on her cheeks at full dip.
Eric couldn’t answer her question with an answer it deserved. He swallowed; a resounding click erupted from his throat. He frowned.
Her smile faded. She jutted her chin and shook her head. “No.”
“I—”
“Eric, we can’t turn back. We have to go through with this. There’s no point in keeping the cabin if you don’t use it. Your dad agrees—they don’t get up here anymore either. And if you want to fully move on, you have to—”
“I know.”
“New freedom and new happinessss,” she reminded him of her personal favorite pillar.
“I—know. It’s just…” His neck stiffened. Eye for an eye, one of yours will die. He shook the thought. My kids are safe. He breathed deep. I am safe, he thought. But he said, “Me and the kids basically grew up here. Every summer since forever. I just feel like I’m losing a part of myself. And for this to be… you know…”
“The first time you’ve seen them in a while?”
“Almost 3 years,” he uttered.
“Yeah, I know. But who’s to say that you guys can’t make new memories at our new house? This was a long time coming, and it’s going to be okay.” Her giddy smile returned. “I’m just really excited to meet your awesome—”
“I love you, Paula,” he said.
She giggled. “Awwww. Eric Baric. I love you too.” She brought her index and middle fingers together, kissed them, then pressed them against his lips. He kissed them in return. Her soft fingers smelled sweet like the strawberry lotion that she rubbed on every morning. “I guarantee when we get there, everything will be fine. It’ll feel like old times. I promise.”
No, it’ll never be like old times, he thought. Paula knew most things about Eric: that he enjoyed fishing alone, that he loved critiquing innovative fluid engineering papers, and that The Martian was the best movie known to mankind…
That I’m forbidden from being within a mile of whiskey. That I’m divorced. That I have four… or three children.
His throat thickened, giving him pause as the thought lingered. She’s gone, he said to himself.
Paula didn’t know his kids. She didn’t know that Sam was a poet and that Bri was in college and that EJ…
Eric peered out the window, grasping at anything he knew about his son other than one of the last things he’d said to him: “Go kill yourself somewhere else!” Shit. Eric could barely remember that because he was knee-deep in his second pint that night.
He secretly hoped that EJ was just as excited to see his old man as Eric was to see his only son. The boy who built a museum of Matchbox cars that took up the walls in his bedroom and most of the garage. The boy who Eric started rebuilding a Mustang with before their family fell apart at the seams. Before whiskey became my best friend, and Xannies became Nicole’s crutch.
As the Tahoe drew closer to the end of the two-track, Eric’s gut swarmed with unresolved nerves. He wished he’d slept some of the anxiety off, but who could with all the scenarios plaguing his mind? There was EJ holding the family pistol and shooing Eric off the porch, his bare ivory boyish face steeped in disappointment. There was Sam, who might not even remember who Eric was—he’d been gone for so long. Bri had offered the kids’ help with packing the cabin up. What if EJ and Sam bailed, hating the idea of seeing their father at all? “Bri doesn’t speak for me!” they’d declare.
“Ah! There they are!” Paula announced, her optimism so enormous that it made his heart twitch. The place was as he left it, small with autumn orange siding, barred windows on the first floor to keep the mythical bears out—Thanks, Grandpa—and a large yard; the land was three miles long, and two miles deep.
The kids stood at the foot of the concrete steps as Eric pulled up with someone who wasn’t their mother.
They all looked grown. Three where there should have been four.
