On Thursday we killed everyone, and it was every bit as wonderful as she had hoped. But on Friday, the first day of our perfect new life together, I woke up with a bad feeling. Late morning sunlight slanted through arched balcony doors. I blinked at Marcia, sleeping next to me on a massive mahogany […]
Google this shit if you want to, but the park is a death trap—and no one seems to give a damn. Governor Healy proposed a “statewide resource” to improve coordination in missing persons cases. That’s it. A resource. Like we haven’t been losing people for decades in the same places, with the same unanswered questions. […]
Detective O’Rourke strolled down an eroding hallway, the shadows hemmed in sulfurous orange while stark-white LEDs splayed across the wall to her right. Smoking inside hadn’t been legal in twenty years, but the building was a rotting shell, so an ember hung a few inches below her fingertips, trailing ghostly smoke. Her hair was in […]
When my campfire died, the darkness rushed in to devour me like a starved hunter. Scrunching my knees to my chest, I defensively pressed my back against the trunk of a gnarled oak tree. I could no longer feel my feet. “Be brave,” I whispered in my mind. I hated the thumping heartbeat in my […]
There are things that live in the walls here, but they don’t tell you that in the welcome tour. Well, they don’t tell you about a lot of things before the state abandons you here for ‘defiance’. Twenty girls jammed in a too-small room. Clothes folded in the lockers but with no locks to keep […]
The Grand Continental did not look like a place you’d bring your daughter to die. When Paula got there and looked out the window, the view was so beautiful she almost cried. The ocean had that impossible green-blue that water in postcards had—or dreams—hugging a gently curving shore, where couples walked hand in hand and […]
They were two old friends, and they decided to meet each day in the park. The park was not far from Stanley’s house, where he had lived his whole adult life. When his children were small, they would go down on Sunday afternoons, around the time his wife couldn’t stand them in the house anymore. […]
Raymond had just turned eighty years old and didn’t care, age was just a number. He sat at his computer watching an online interview of the famous author of Romance Fantasy, Leslie Sorenson. She was attractive, even sans makeup. Tall, with penetrating green eyes and long brown hair. Seth the blogger had already covered her […]
Lester Grainger had lived in Green Prairie for less than eighteen months, but he would never live to see a full year and a half. There was nothing about him that was striking, nothing that would cause a woman to take notice of his looks, nor would any man find him a challenge to their […]
Baines had knocked several times on the mahogany door that morning but no response. You never knew with Mr. Lavery he could be a real devil, give you hell. Yet when mother was dying, he’d been so kind. You had to handle him carefully. Not everyone would suit the job. Ricky Lavery finally rolled out […]