Chapter 5 - Footsteps in the Powder
"Emily?" Arthur’s voice was low, terrifyingly calm, carrying effortlessly across the frozen lawn. "Don't be childish. You’re making an absolute mess of Christmas."
I froze beneath the drooping boughs of a blue spruce, pressing my face into the freezing pine needles. The scent of sap and decaying earth mixed with the copper tang of blood in my mouth.
His heavy boots crunched into the snow. *Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.*
He wasn't running. He was pacing with the methodical confidence of a hunter tracking a gut-shot deer. He reached the bottom of the second-story window where I had initially landed. I heard him nudge the disturbed snow with his boot.
"I know you can hear me," he said, stepping closer to my tracks. "You always were stubborn, just like your mother. You think anyone in this town is going to take your word over mine? You're an injured nurse with a workers' comp claim, hopped up on painkillers. You slipped. That's the story."
He struck the magnesium flare against its cap. A blinding hiss of red fire flared up, casting long, grotesque shadows across the yard. The chemical smell of sulfur washed over the spruce hedge.
He was going to burn away the blood evidence before the police could ever arrive.
I inched backward through the narrow gap under Henderson’s cedar split-rail fence. A protruding rusty nail tore through my denim jeans, gouging into my hip, but the cold had numbed the tissue so deeply I barely felt the tear.
May you like
Then, Arthur stopped. His boots paused ten feet away from my hiding spot. The red flare illuminated the dark smear where I had dragged myself under the bottom rail.
"There you are," he whispered.
