Chapter 4 - The Mourning Monster
By 1:00 p.m., the local news had gone national.
I turned on the humming, boxy television bolted to the motel wall. The local news anchor’s face was solemn, framed by red breaking-news graphics:
**TRAGEDY IN OAK BROOK: GAS EXPLOSION LEVELSS RESIDENCE OF LOCAL BUSINESSMAN.**
The screen cut to live footage from the street outside our house.
Where my kitchen had been—where I had brewed coffee six hours earlier—there was only a smoldering, blackened crater surrounded by shattered timbers, melted plastic siding, and yellow crime-scene tape fluttering in the winter wind. Firefighters were still spraying a steady stream of water onto the hiss of smoking debris.
Then the camera pivoted.
A sleek black town car pulled up to the police blockade. The door opened, and Derek stepped out.
He had flown back. Or rather, he had never boarded that plane to Denver at all. He had driven back the moment his brother Marcus had called him.
The camera zoomed in on Derek’s face.
I felt a cold nausea slither down into my gut.
He was weeping.
He fell to his knees in the slush beside the police barricade, burying his face in his hands. A police captain and an EMT immediately rushed to his side, catching his arms, trying to lift him. Derek’s shoulders shook with violent, theatrical sobs.
“My wife!” his voice carried clearly across the microphones of the gathered press corps. “My baby girl! Please tell me they got out! Someone tell me they’re in an ambulance!”
The police captain shook his head gently, placing a consoling hand on Derek’s shoulder.
“We are conducting an active recovery operation, Mr. Vance. You need to come with us to the precinct. You shouldn't be seeing this.”
“No! No! Elena! Lily!” Derek screamed, collapsing forward onto the hood of a cruiser, his face a portrait of shattered, unbearable grief.
Sitting on the edge of the cheap motel bed, I stared at the screen, my fingernails digging into the palm of my hand until the skin broke.
It was an Oscar-worthy performance.
The news anchor’s voice returned, choked with manufactured emotion: *“An unimaginable nightmare for developer Derek Vance, who had just departed for a business conference when a catastrophic natural gas line rupture decimated his family home. Officials confirm that Mrs. Elena Vance and six-year-old Lily Vance are presumed to have been inside at the time of detonation...”*
“He’s lying,” Lily whispered from behind me.
I looked back. She was watching the screen, her small face completely devoid of expression.
“He’s crying like when he accidentally broke Grandma’s crystal bowl,” Lily said softly. “He smiled right after everyone looked away.”
Her observation hit me like a splash of ice water.
Derek was setting the narrative. To the entire world, we were dead. If our bodies were never pulled from that ash heap, he would claim the explosion was hot enough to cremate organic matter—or worse, he would hire Marcus to find us, finish the job in some dark ditch, and claim we had wandered off in shock before dying of exposure.
He couldn't afford for us to walk into a police station.
If we walked in alive, the insurance was void. The fraud investigation would crush him. And the arson charges would put him in a federal penitentiary for the rest of his life.
We weren't just fleeing a domestic abuser.
We were running from a syndicate that had staked ten million dollars on our deaths.
Suddenly, the screen on the old iPhone lit up again.
A new email appeared in Derek’s mirrored inbox.
**From:** *Marcus Vance*
**To:** *Derek Vance*
**Subject:** *Found her car.*
I stopped breathing.
*She didn’t take the SUV. It’s still under the collapsed garage beam. But the clerk at the Texaco on Route 9 says a woman matching her description with a kid in bunny pajamas bought juice and bandages two hours ago. They’re on foot. They can’t have made it more than a mile from the highway strip.*
I looked out the dirt-filmed window of Room 114.
May you like
Down in the motel parking lot, an unmarked white cargo van slowly turned off Route 9, its tires crunching across the gravel as it idled directly beneath our window.
***
