Chapter 2 - Thirteen Minutes Across Town
The fluorescent lighting of the audit conference room hummed at a frequency that always made Vanessa’s temples throb by noon. She had seven color-coded binders laid out across the mahogany table, reconciling the inventory write-downs of an automotive supplier whose offshore shipping manifests didn't match their warehouse intake logs.
To anyone else, it was mind-numbing labor. To Vanessa, it was an anchor. Numbers were clean. If a shipment of seventy-two thousand ball bearings went missing between Kaohsiung and Cleveland, there was a paper trail. Someone had forged a bill of lading, someone had miscounted an intake skid, or someone had committed outright theft. There was always a cause, always an accountable party, and always an outcome that could be resolved with an adjusting entry.
At 12:35 p.m., her junior associate, Greg, slid a paper cup of lukewarm Earl Grey tea next to her elbow. "You haven't looked up from that spreadsheet since nine, Vanessa. Take a breath. The client isn't meeting us until two."
Vanessa rubbed the bridge of her nose, her eyes stinging from the glare of the monitors. "If I don't balance this inventory reserve today, the state auditors are going to flag the entire Q3 filing. We’re off by fourteen thousand dollars on raw materials."
"Fourteen thousand is round-off error for a forty-million-dollar outfit," Greg remarked, leaning against the chair back.
"Not when the discrepancy is in volatile chemicals," Vanessa countered, her voice tight with professional discipline. "They’re missing drums of toluene and acetone. You don't lose acetone in a clerical error, Greg. It evaporates, or somebody walked it out the loading dock. Either way, it’s a liability."
Her desk phone—a heavy black Cisco VoIP unit connected to her direct line—chirped with an abrasive, two-tone ring.
Vanessa glanced at the caller ID display. *MARTHA HARPER - HOME*.
Her watch read 12:38 p.m.
An icy shock of adrenaline hit Vanessa’s bloodstream with the suddenness of a car crash. Martha never called her desk line; she had Vanessa’s cell number, which sat untouched on the silent charging pad beside her laptop. A call to the office meant Martha had bypassed the cell, or she had grabbed whatever landline speed-dial she remembered.
Vanessa snatched the receiver before the second ring finished. "Martha? Is everything okay?"
The sound that came through the earpiece was not Martha’s calm, measured voice. It was a chaotic storm of violent percussive thuds, splintering wood, and a woman screaming so loudly that the microphone clipped into harsh, screeching distortion.
*THUD. THUD. CRACK.*
"Vanessa! Vanessa, dear God!" Martha’s voice was high-pitched, ragged, gasping for air. In the background, a man’s voice roared through glass, muffled but deafeningly furious: *"OPEN THE GODDAMN DOOR! I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE, YOU LITTLE BRAT! OPEN IT!"*
"Martha!" Vanessa rose out of her executive chair so fast the casters struck the credenza behind her, sending a stack of manila folders cascading across the carpet. Greg jumped back, his eyes wide. "Where is Ethan? What is happening?"
"Derek’s in the backyard!" Martha shrieked. A violent impact shook the line—the sound of an elbow or an iron pipe smashing into the reinforced double-paned patio slider. "He’s banging on the glass! He’s screaming Ethan’s name! He has a tire iron, Vanessa! He’s trying to break the lock on the patio!"
"Where is Ethan?" Vanessa yelled, her fingernails digging into the plastic receiver until her knuckles turned ivory.
"In the kitchen with me! I locked the door like you said! I pushed the kitchen table against the slider, but he’s—"
Through the receiver, the sound of tearing metal and shattered safety glass detonated like a gunshot.
A child’s high, terror-stricken scream pierced the air: *"MOMMY!"*
"Get off him!" Martha screamed, her voice suddenly distant, as if the phone had been dropped onto the hardwood floor. *"Derek, get out! Get away from that boy! The police are coming!"*
*"Shut up, you old bat! Give me the keys! Where are the shed keys? I know she keeps them in the drawer!"* Derek’s voice was guttural, wild, slurred with an adrenaline-fueled fury.
*"Ethan, run!"* Martha’s voice was cut short by a wet, heavy thud—the sickening sound of human flesh striking cabinetry—followed by an old woman’s sharp, pained gasp.
Then came the heavy, deadening slam of the utility room door swinging shut, the clatter of a sliding chain, and the abrupt, hollow buzz of a severed connection.
The line went dead.
"Vanessa?" Greg stepped forward, his hand hovering near her shoulder. "Vanessa, what’s wrong? Who was that?"
Vanessa did not speak. She did not grab her coat. She did not lock her workstation. The primal circuitry of her brain had completely bypassed the analytical accountant who calculated risk and balanced ledgers.
She grabbed her car keys from her tote, leaving her phone, her purse, and her ID badge on the desk. She sprinted down the carpeted hallway of the sixth floor, ignoring the startled glances of senior partners stepping out of their corner offices. She didn't wait for the brass elevator cabs; she shoved open the heavy steel fire door to the stairwell, her heels clattering like machine-gun fire against the concrete treads as she took the stairs three at a time.
Down six flights. Her lungs burned. The iron taste of panic flooded her mouth.
*Ethan.*
She burst through the ground-floor lobby, shoving past the security turnstiles, setting off a low-toned alarm that echoed against the marble walls. The security guard yelled after her, but she was already through the revolving doors into the biting, damp Columbus air.
She reached her Honda Civic in the executive surface lot. Her hands shook so violently that it took her three attempts to align the key fob with the ignition slot. The four-cylinder engine roared to life. She dropped the transmission into reverse, the tires screeching against the asphalt as she backed out, clipping an orange traffic cone, and tore out onto Third Street.
It was eight point four miles from the downtown business district to the modest, tree-lined street in South Clintonville where her house stood.
Under normal midday conditions, navigating the synchronized traffic lights on High Street, the construction choke points on Summit, and the school zones around campus took twenty-four minutes.
Vanessa did it in thirteen.
She slammed the hazard-light button on her dashboard. The yellow indicators flashed a rhythmic, frantic warning as she blew through a turning red light onto Fourth Avenue, her horn blaring continuously. Drivers swerved, horns blared in outraged counterpoint, a delivery van slammed on its brakes, its tires smoking against the asphalt, but Vanessa did not lift her foot from the accelerator.
*Ethan was in the kitchen. Martha fell. Derek had a tire iron.*
*Where did he take him? Why did the door slam?*
"Hold on, Ethan," she sobbed aloud, the tears finally coming—hot, blinding streaks across her cheeks that she wiped away with the rough wool of her sleeve. "Hold on, baby. Mommy’s coming. Just hide. Please God, make him hide."
The sky grew darker as she drove north, the low clouds turning a bruised, ominous purple. But as she crossed Hudson Street and turned into the older, residential grid of Clintonville, she realized the darkness ahead was not weather.
A column of thick, oily, pitch-black smoke was rising over the tree line, towering like an obscene black thumb against the gray sky.
It wasn't coming from the main street. It was rising from the alley behind Maplewood Avenue.
Vanessa’s stomach plummeted into an abyss of cold, sickening dread. That wasn't wood smoke from a fireplace. That was the black, toxic, chemical smoke of burning paint thinner, synthetic varnish, pressurized aerosol cans, and cured yellow pine.
Marcus’s workshop.
"No," Vanessa whispered, her voice cracking into a ragged plea. "No, no, no, no."
She rounded the final corner onto Maplewood.
Two doors down from her house, neighbors were running out onto their front lawns, phones pressed to their ears. An elderly man in a flannel shirt was dragging a garden hose across his driveway. Further down, parked crookedly across the apron of her driveway with its driver-side door flung wide open, was Derek’s beat-up blue Buick LeSabre, its engine idling with a rough, rhythmic clatter, exhaust sputtering into the damp air.
May you like
And behind the house, roaring above the roofline of the two-story Craftsman, forty-foot sheets of violent orange flame were tearing through the roof of the workshop, throwing showers of sparks and burning tar-paper embers into the overcast sky.
***
