Overheard Plans

The dust tasted like old newspapers and dead wasps. Elena pulled herself forward, her elbows raw against the rough plywood beams, the fiberglass insulation clinging to her sweat-dampened skin like spun glass. Every inch was a battle against the urge to cough, a silent war fought in the pitch-black throat of the house.

She wasn't just crawling away from the nursery; she was crawling toward the only weapon she had left. The attic access was another twenty feet, a jagged obstacle course of ductwork and wiring harnesses. But the image of the red, circular burn on Leo’s thigh burned brighter than the darkness, fueling her muscles with a cold, murderous rage.

She reached the section of the crawlspace that spanned the vaulted ceiling of the great room. The floor joists here were wider, the gaps between them filled with the muffled, echoey acoustics of the large space below.

Light filtered up through the cracks in the tongue-and-groove ceiling, thin blades of illumination that sliced through the dust motes dancing in the stagnant air. Elena froze, pressing her face against the rough wood.

The voices were directly underneath her.

"...too risky with the knife," Val was saying, her voice stripped of the sisterly lilt, flat and hard. "If she actually uses it, and the cops see defense wounds on you, it changes the narrative."

"Let her hold it," Marcus replied. The sound of liquid pouring into a glass drifted up—scotch, neat. "It establishes intent. The unstable mother, driven mad by isolation and grief, threatening the family. We have the text messages to prove her state of mind."

Elena squeezed her eyes shut. The messages. He had been spoofing texts from her phone for days, probably sending manic rants to his own device, building a digital paper trail of her insanity while she was busy keeping their son alive.

"And the boy?" Val asked. "He’s tracking too much. He saw me with the lighter. If he types something..."

"He won't type anything," Marcus said, his voice dismissing Leo’s existence as easily as he would a spreadsheet error. "The ventilator is the primary point of failure. The lung collapse will be consistent with his history."

Elena clamped a hand over her mouth, biting into her palm until she tasted copper. They weren't planning to murder them violently. They were planning a tragedy. A medical failure exacerbated by a storm. A grieving mother who snapped. It was clean. It was corporate.

"When?" Val asked. The ice in her voice cracked, revealing the greed beneath. "I’m freezing in this house, Marcus. I want to be in Cabo by Tuesday."

Elena pressed her ear to the gap in the wood, straining to hear the verdict of her own execution.

"Tonight," Marcus said. "When the power goes. It'll look like equipment failure."