Chapter 4

The screen was dark, the picture grainy, the edges tinged with the green glow of an aging lens.

It opened on meaningless shaking, with the harsh hiss of fingers rubbing against the microphone.

“This junk phone keeps freezing… fine, the locator light's on, that's all we need.”

Max's voice came through right against the mic, grating.

Then someone set the phone down to one side. The picture tilted, half a table coming into view.

Blurry as it was, I recognized the pink plastic packet on the table at a glance — the poison.

My mom sat with her back to the camera, a few paper insurance policies gathered in her hands.

“…We move the morning after tomorrow. I'll brew the herbal tea,” she said, her heavy accent woven through the static. “Once that crippled girl Claire stops breathing, we say Jane did it in one of her crazy fits. The fake diagnosis is already taken care of — and dead, Claire can't testify against anyone.”

Leo's face never appeared — just a hand with a cigarette wedged between the fingers, drifting across the edge of the frame.

“Good. Once she's locked in the holding room, you and Dad go in the middle of the night, smash your own heads open, play it pitiful, and slip her this junk phone. As long as she runs into the deep mountains carrying that locator… then the insurance money is locked in.”

The video was only fourteen seconds long.

The screen went black and cut off.

In the ruined chapel there was only the thunder outside.

I doubled over the dusty altar table and dry-heaved up the last sour dregs in my stomach, tears all over my face.

They didn't just want me to take the fall — they wanted to wring the last drop of life out of me for money. Claire's death, the beating in the yard that afternoon, the gash on my mom's forehead tonight… all of it was an elaborate chain of death they'd designed three days ago.

Just then, I noticed a tiny “location sharing” icon blinking at the very top of the screen. The battery in the corner showed only ten percent left.

Almost at the same moment, there came the snap of a dry branch breaking outside the chapel.

“The locator says she's right around here. Move fast, don't let her get away.”

It was Leo's voice.

A blinding flashlight beam swept across the cobwebbed wall through the gaps in the chapel's drafty wooden door.

“Leo, I tied the rope into a good slipknot — we'll just loop it around her neck.” That was Max.

Less than thirty feet away.

I clamped a hand over my mouth, refusing to let out the faintest heavy breath.

There was no running. Leo and Max were right outside. To bolt now would be to throw myself onto a blade.

By a flash of lightning, I scanned the tiny chapel — barely a hundred and fifty square feet.

No cabinet to hide in, no iron tool to defend myself with. The only way out was a half-collapsed hole in the wall behind the base of a statue.

I pulled the five thousand dollars from the bag and stuffed it tight against my body, inside my underclothes. Then I hurled the old phone with its blinking locator hard through the wall hole, into the bottomless weed-choked gully behind the chapel.

A heartbeat before the flashlight beam shoved the chapel's wooden door open with a bang, I bent low and scrambled out through the wall hole on my hands and feet.

Outside the hole was a brutally steep slope.

At the bottom of it was the pit the village used to use for dumping dead pigs, dead dogs, and stove ash.

These days of storms had turned that garbage pit into a reeking pool of rotten mud.

Without a second's hesitation, I slid straight down the slope into the muck.

The freezing, foul water swallowed me to the waist in an instant. I lay flat in the mud, frantically raking the rotting leaves and stinking dead branches around me up over my head and body, layer after layer.

“Nobody in the chapel!” Max's voice came from above.

“Impossible — the locator's still moving. She must've gone out the back. After her!”

Heavy boots came pounding closer through the mud.

I buried myself fully in the muck, only my nostrils barely above the surface to breathe.

The stink of mud and rotting animal carcasses jammed up my nose, my eardrums swollen from the soaking rain. Some insect crawled across my eyelid, and I didn't dare so much as twitch a lash.

“She's down there!”

Leo's voice burst out, terrifyingly close.

My whole body went rigid.

Leo was standing right at the edge of the slope, less than two feet above my head.

The flashlight's ghastly white beam split the dark like a knife, falling straight onto the mud pool where I hid.

Rainwater dripped off the toe of Leo's shoe, tapping onto the rotten leaves I'd used to cover myself.

I kept my eyes shut tight, my lips pressed into a thin line, breathing with the greatest care.

If he poked down with the hatchet in his hand, or if the rain washed away a bit of that leaf cover, I was finished.

“Leo, look over there!” Max suddenly shouted.

The flashlight beam jerked away, swinging toward the weed-choked gully.

“Damn it! The little wretch slid down toward the cliff!” Leo swore.

That was where the old phone had tumbled.

“That spot's steep as hell, and there's a fast current at the bottom. If she went down there, she's definitely dead.” Max's voice wavered.

“Living, we need a body; dead, we need a body! No corpse, no money. Get down there and find her!”

The footsteps hurried off along the gully, until I couldn't hear them anymore.

I stayed in the mud, not moving.

Only once I was sure there was nothing but rain around me did I slowly lift my head out of that pile of stinking leaves.