CHAPTER 3
“He is Mark’s son.”
Those five words hung in the freezing, rain-soaked air, heavier than the massive thunderclouds rolling over the Ohio plains.
I stared at the scarred man. I stared at the emaciated golden retriever pressing its wet, bony body against the man’s heavy boots. And then, I stared at the tiny, shivering boy clutching the canvas jacket.
My brain violently rejected the information. It was like trying to swallow shards of broken glass.
Mark’s son.
I had been married to Mark for three years. I knew every scar on his hands, every story from his childhood, every fear he kept hidden behind his stoic, hard-working exterior. We had spent countless nights laying awake in the dark, whispering about the family we were going to build.
He had never mentioned another child. He had never mentioned a past marriage.
“You’re lying,” I choked out. The mud was freezing against my skin, and the rain was blinding me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the boy. “Mark doesn’t have any other children. We are having his first baby. He would have told me. He would never hide something like this.”
The scarred man—the ghost of the father Martha had claimed was dead—looked down at me with eyes so full of sorrow it physically made my chest ache.
“Mark didn’t hide him from you,” the man said, his deep voice slicing through the howl of the storm. “He couldn’t. Because Mark believes this little boy died the day he was born.”
Martha, who was still kneeling in the mud by the wooden gate, let out a sudden, jagged wail. It sounded like an animal caught in a steel trap. She grabbed handfuls of the thick sludge, smearing it across her own face, rocking back and forth.
“Shut up!” she screamed, her voice completely unhinged. “You don’t know anything! You were rotting in the dirt! You were supposed to be rotting in the dirt!”
The man slowly turned his piercing blue eyes toward the woman who had once been his wife.
“I dug myself out of that cellar, Martha,” he growled, taking a slow, heavy step toward her. The golden retriever, Buster, let out a low, menacing growl, baring his teeth at the woman who had locked him in the dark for two years.
“I dug through the clay and the gravel with my bare hands while my blood poured into the soil,” he continued, his voice steady, rhythmic, and utterly terrifying. “You hit me with the iron fire poker. You dragged me down those stone steps. You locked the heavy steel doors and you piled the tractor weights on top so I couldn’t push them open. You left me down there to starve in the pitch black.”
I listened in absolute, paralyzed horror.
This woman, this woman who baked apple pies for the church bake sale, who knitted baby blankets in the living room, had attempted to murder her own husband and bury him in an abandoned root cellar.
“Why?” I sobbed, clutching my pregnant stomach, feeling a sharp, terrifying cramp ripple through my lower abdomen. “Why would you do that?”
The man didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes locked firmly on Martha, who was now hyperventilating, her chest heaving violently under her soaked clothes.
“Because I found out what she did to Emily,” he said.
The name meant nothing to me, but to Martha, it was a physical blow. She scrambled backward in the mud, trying to get away from him, but the heavy wooden gate blocked her path.
“Emily was a good girl,” the man said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, deadly whisper. “She was nineteen. She worked down at the diner on Route 4. Mark was head over heels in love with her. He wanted to marry her. But she wasn’t good enough for you, was she, Martha?”
Martha shook her head frantically, her wet gray hair sticking to her terrified face. “She was trash! She was trailer trash! She would have ruined his life! She would have dragged him down into the gutter!”
“She was pregnant with your grandson!” the man roared, the sudden volume of his voice making the little boy flinch and hide his face deeper into the canvas jacket.
The man instantly softened, reaching down to gently stroke the boy’s matted hair before looking back at the wretched woman in the mud.
“Mark was out on a hauling job when Emily went into labor early,” the man explained, his eyes burning with an intense, furious fire. “She drove herself out here to the farm because she was terrified and alone. She came to you for help.”
I felt the bile rising in my throat. I could picture it perfectly. I knew exactly how isolated this property was. I knew the exact terror of being pregnant, in pain, and at the mercy of Martha.
“You delivered the baby in the upstairs bedroom,” the man said. “And then, what did you tell Mark when he rushed home three days later?”
“I told him the truth!” Martha shrieked defensively, pointing a trembling, mud-caked finger at him. “The girl was weak! There were complications! She bled out before the ambulance could get here!”
“And the baby?” the man demanded, taking another step closer.
Martha’s eyes darted wildly around the yard. She looked at the rusted truck, she looked at the little boy, and then she looked at me, as if expecting me to somehow defend her.
“I told him the baby didn’t make it either,” she whispered, her voice finally breaking. “I told him we buried them both in the county cemetery. I did it to protect him! I did it so he could start over! So he could find a proper wife. So he could have a proper family!”
She pointed directly at my swollen stomach.
“Like her! I did this for you, Mark! I did this for our family’s legacy!”
The sheer, unfathomable delusion in her words made my blood run completely cold. She honestly believed she was a loving mother. She honestly believed the monstrous, unspeakable acts she had committed were justified.
“You didn’t protect him,” the man spat, standing over her now. “You murdered a terrified nineteen-year-old girl. You wrapped her in a tarp and threw her in the old limestone quarry.”
My breath caught in my throat. Murder. She had actually killed a girl.
“And the boy,” the man continued, gesturing to the tiny, silent child clutching his leg. “You didn’t have the stomach to snap a newborn’s neck. But you couldn’t let Mark see him. You couldn’t let anyone see him. Because he was proof of Emily.”
The pieces were falling into place, creating a picture so horrific my mind could barely process it.
“You locked a newborn baby in the rusted horse trailer at the very back of the barn,” the man said, his voice shaking with a heavy, deeply buried grief. “You fed him just enough to keep him breathing. You kept him chained in the dark for six years. Six years, Martha.”
I looked at the little boy. Leo.
He was so incredibly small. His skin was pale and translucent from a complete lack of sunlight. He hadn’t spoken a single word since stepping out of the truck. His eyes were wide, taking in the sky, the rain, the trees, as if he was seeing an entirely alien planet.
He had never known the warmth of a bed. He had never known the sound of a television, or the taste of warm food, or the gentle touch of a mother.
His entire existence had been the inside of a rusted metal box, surrounded by the smell of livestock and rotting hay, trapped in perpetual darkness.
“And Buster?” I asked, my voice trembling uncontrollably.
The man looked at the golden retriever. The dog wagged its tail weakly, limping slightly in the mud.
“Dogs are smart,” the man said softly. “Buster caught the scent. Two years ago, he got into the barn. He found the trailer. He started barking and scratching at the metal, trying to get to the boy. Martha couldn’t risk Mark hearing the dog.”
Martha had locked my sweet, loving dog in a filthy stall right next to the trailer. She had let him slowly starve alongside her own hidden grandson.
“I couldn’t come back,” the man said, looking down at his scarred hands. “Not right away. When I dug myself out of that cellar fifteen years ago, I was half dead. My skull was fractured. I dragged myself miles through the woods to the highway. A trucker picked me up. By the time I recovered in a charity hospital two states away, I had no memory of who I was. The trauma wiped me clean.”
He reached up and touched the deep, jagged scar running down the side of his face.
“The memories only started coming back a few years ago. Fragments. Nightmares. A red barn. A rusted Ford truck. A woman with cold, dead eyes. It took me years to track this place down. I’ve been watching the farm from the tree line for the last three weeks, trying to figure out if Mark was in on it.”
He looked at me, his blue eyes intense.
“When Mark drove his rig out of here three months ago, I started creeping closer. I broke into the barn last night while Martha was asleep. That’s when I found the trailer. That’s when I found the boy.”
Another sharp, agonizing cramp ripped through my stomach. It was much stronger this time. It wasn’t a dull ache. It was a searing, fiery pain that radiated from my lower back all the way down to my thighs.
I let out a loud groan, curling tighter into a ball in the freezing mud.
“The baby,” I gasped, tears mixing with the pouring rain on my cheeks. “Something is wrong. It hurts.”
The man immediately turned his attention to me. The anger vanished from his face, replaced by urgent concern.
He reached into the cab of the truck, pulling out a heavy, dry wool blanket. He draped it carefully over the little boy’s shoulders, whispering something softly in his ear.
Then, he walked through the deep mud toward me.
He knelt down, ignoring the freezing sludge soaking into his denim jeans. He reached out with his thick, scarred hands, grasping my shoulders with surprising gentleness.
“We need to get you out of the cold,” he said, his deep voice offering the first sense of safety I had felt in months. “Can you stand?”
“I don’t know,” I sobbed, my teeth chattering violently. “My legs are completely numb.”
He didn’t hesitate. He slid one massive arm under my knees and the other behind my back. With a low grunt of effort, he lifted my heavy, pregnant body out of the freezing mud as if I weighed absolutely nothing.
The sudden movement made my head spin, but the warmth radiating from his body was an instant relief.
Buster let out a sharp bark, trotting quickly to stand right beside the little boy, pressing his golden fur against the child’s side in a protective stance.
“Take us to the house,” I whispered to the man, burying my face into his wet canvas jacket. “Please. I need to call an ambulance.”
The man turned toward the farmhouse.
But Martha was suddenly on her feet.
She had scrambled out of the mud, moving with a desperate, frantic speed that shouldn’t have been possible for a woman her age.
She ran up the wooden steps of the back porch, her heavy muck boots slamming against the wood. She threw open the back door, disappearing into the kitchen for barely three seconds.
When she stepped back out onto the porch, my heart completely stopped.
She wasn’t holding a mop. She wasn’t holding a rag.
Clutched tightly in her trembling, mud-stained hands was Mark’s heavy, double-barreled hunting shotgun.
May you like
She raised the heavy wooden stock to her shoulder, pointing the massive, dark steel barrels directly at the man holding me in his arms.
“Nobody is going inside,” Martha screamed, her voice tearing through the sound of the rain. “Nobody is leaving this farm!”
