Ashes of October

Mark answered before the second ring. Always did when calls came after nine.

Cough-cough-miss. Mark was home.

The woods shut behind her.

Light was different.

The rifle lay across Sarah’s lap. Mark had called it Ghost.

The house had been dark for an hour.

She could smell herself now.

Sarah sat three blocks from Rebecca’s house, trying to decide if this was the worst idea she’d ever had.

She’d been watching the door for forty minutes.

The highway narrowed to two lanes, an uneven strip of asphalt that caught headlights in scattered flashes of quartz. She’d left the trailer park an hour ago, driving until the adrenaline crash demanded she stop. Billboards leaned half-collapsed in the fields. A few gas stations still glowed in the distance, their signs flickering with digits one cent apart, more ritual than competition.

The planks gave under her boots with the particular hollow sound of old wood over moving water, each step announcing itself and then swallowed.

Radio off, both hands on the wheel, eyes flicking to the mirror every few seconds.

George Holt had been awake for two days when the pattern finally took shape.

Three years before Mark’s death.

The lot at Twisted Lanes was still a crime scene at seven in the morning.

George woke to the smell of Spanish rice and a hip full of broken glass.

“We’ll fill up here,” Miguel said. “We don’t get second chances tonight.”

The road had forgotten where it was going.

The stairwell door looked like part of the wall.