Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  The smoke was getting really bad, and my ankle really hurt but I knew that if I stayed there I would get hurt even more. I wanted to call out to Mom or Felix, but there was this roaring sound that was getting louder and louder and I didn’t think I could make my voice loud enough for anyone to hear me over that huge roar.

  So I went and hid underneath one of the trees. It was still cool underneath the branches, and so I hid until the roaring stopped.

  I hid while other people came and screamed at the fire. I stayed there, without anyone noticing me, while Mom and Tobias tried to put the fire out.

  Maybe I should have gone and gotten help, but I don’t like vegetables and this way Mom will have to let me eat the peanut butter. Plus, I was really scared. Any kid would be, wouldn’t they?

  That’s what I’m counting on everyone thinking.

  Before Mom and everyone else came to try to save the greenhouse, I saw something else. Something really important. Something that could help everyone figure out why the greenhouse burnt down.

  The thing I didn’t tell Veronica that day in school was that I told on her for another reason. It wasn’t just to help Tommy make sure he had enough to eat and that he could enjoy his snack. I told on her because I was sick and tired of not getting enough fun snacks either. At home, Greta always refused to buy anything like goldfish crackers or fruit snacks or even potato chips. School was the only place I could get the special treats I wanted.

  When I want something, I usually get it.

  So this time I’m not going to be a tattletale. I’ll let them figure it out all alone.

  34

  Mark

  I wake, strapped into my bed again. It’s a surreal feeling, to be restrained in your own home, in your own bed, by the people you love because they think you’re going to hurt yourself.

  If I were smarter, I’d learn how to play the game and make sure they didn’t worry about me, but it’s so hard sometimes, with the weight of the day pressing down on you like a thousand pounds of water. And then you come up to the surface and you can barely breathe, sick with the bends.

  The light from the small lamp in the corner of the adjacent room dances along the ceiling in the darkness.

  “Who’s there?”

  No one responds to my question. I try to move my arms and legs, but whoever has done the straps secured them tight. Sometimes, when Felix is asked to do it he’ll leave enough space around the buckles to let me slip out and find some relief.

  “Can you untie me?” I’m certain someone is there. I can hear their breathing, even over the timid blip and hum of the machines Brenna insists I stay hooked up to.

  The person in the corner moves further into the edge of my sick room until I can’t see them anymore. Oh, how easy it is for some people to disappear.

  When I first started my company, I was going to change the world. For the better, I should add. I was going to make people’s lives better with my technology. Alternative energy is the future—I still believe that, by the way, not that it seems to matter now—and fifteen years ago I came out of school with venture capitalists frothing at the mouth to give me their money so I could expand solar panel use and installation. I’d come up with a way to capture solar energy that was almost three times as efficient as the best product out there, and everybody wanted in.

  So I set up a company and got funding. I hired a lawyer and some programmers and other executive-type people, who got the factory in China up and running, and I’d made my first million clear of costs and overhead within six months. It was a success, and it was making energy more available to everyone, across the world.

  I felt like a real hero.

  I met Brenna in college when we were both undergrads. It was wild at first, to be with someone so beautiful and smart and absolutely ruthless. It was different from anything else I’d ever experienced, and she opened my eyes to all sorts of new possibilities, just when I thought my life was over.

  I may have built a billion-dollar company, but Brenna did almost the same thing in about half the time. I never questioned how she did it, and by the time it was too late, and I had a gun to my head after being ripped from a fucking hospital bed in my own home, I didn’t even want to know.

  Sure, people think those hired guns who broke into our home were there for me, and I suppose they were in a way, but it’s my wife who’s the killer. She sees an opportunity, and nothing will stop her from getting exactly what she wants.

  I saw it in her face, that night when the men came and ripped me from my bed and waved guns around my home. Brenna was frightened. There was no mistaking that.

  In her own way, I know she loves me. And the children. But when she looked at me that night, there was something missing from her face. The way she set her jaw. The cool leveling of her eyes at mine.

  She wasn’t going to give up her life to save mine. And by her life, I mean her company. Her real baby she’s brought into this world. She was going to negotiate some sort of truce with whoever hired those men. But first she was going to let them shoot me. I saw it in her face.

  But then Darren and Tobias rescued me.

  I’m thinking all of this now, as though it was something I had figured out in that slice of a moment between being alive and being dead on the stairwell, but I didn’t. Afterwards, I was just so relieved to be alive, and that my family had survived, that I wasn’t thinking about Brenna and what she did. Or didn’t do. It’s not until now, my head finally clearing, that I’m able to ask that essential question: Why? Why did she want me dead?

  Afterwards we bought a gun and Brenna put in the keypads and the extra locks, while I got sicker and sicker. I was fighting for my life and trying to run my company, and all the while Brenna was taking away my lifelines, slowly and steadily, until I wouldn’t have anything left to keep me connected to the outside world.

  My ability to move, my ability to speak. Surrounded by loved ones, but no one who would listen to me.

  No, it was only after all these months and months of lying in this bed that I realized what Brenna was doing. My mind’s gotten clearer and the edges sharper.

  That’s why she fired the nurse that was here before Margot. She was starting to pay attention to what I said—not just understand it, but really listen to it—and Brenna couldn’t have that.

  I know Margot’s been hurt, but I’m not sure how badly. She hasn’t been to see me for days and days.

  Tobias has told me things, while sitting here at my bedside, that have made my blood cool. Terrible things.

  “Are you still there?”

  I try one more time, but whoever was in here watching me has gone. I’m alone, in this darkened room, unable to protect myself with anything other than my thoughts.

  I hear a door slam, somewhere far away—over in the other wing of the house, I’m sure—and I picture Margot’s kind face, looking down at me as she held my hand.

  I wonder if she’ll live to see the end of this.

  35

  Brenna

  “I don’t know what to do.” I squeeze Mark’s hand. It’s early morning, and the medicine we give him at night ensures that he sleeps deeply. He can’t hear me, but that’s okay. I don’t know if I want him to hear this.

  “We are all going to die if I don’t do something,” I continue.

  Tobias keeps saying that the greenhouse probably caught on fire naturally. There were a lot of chemicals stored in there, he said, and all I wanted to do was scream at him, “Well, then why did you keep them all there, together?” If they were so easy to go up in flames, why didn’t you do something to protect us?

  I fed the children more beans for dinner tonight. Beans every meal of the day now, until the end of time. I’ve had to soak them overnight, and then boil them into a mush the next day. We have bags and bags of them, thanks to Greta doing some online ordering in bulk from a natural foods website Mark had turned her onto a while ago. I’d never heard of it before, but Mark knew—knows—all of those companies from hi
s own business connections. NatureFill, the bags say. Mark probably went to lunch with the CEO and then decided to order a bunch of products after hearing the company’s pitch. That’s just the type of guy he is—the kind who invests in a company before knowing anything more about it except that he likes their talk and that they paid for lunch. He listens to his gut.

  And sometimes his gut pays off, and sometimes it loses.

  I get up and move over to the safe buried at the back of the linen closet. Everything is locked up tight in this house, but I know that doesn’t really matter. If someone wants to get in bad enough, they’ll get in.

  And then there are the people who are already inside these walls, or on these grounds. I think of that altar underneath the tree, the blood smeared across the doll’s face. Margot looked so scared when I told her.

  Behind me, Mark stirs in his sleep. He’s looking worse and worse. His skin is waxy and he keeps losing weight. I’ve had to increase some of the dosages for his painkillers, just to keep him from trying to leave the bed and screaming out in his sleep.

  It won’t be long now. And when he goes, what will I have left?

  Felix and Daphne.

  Being a mother is so hard. Loving your children is hard. You’re supposed to give them everything you have, and they still grow and change until they’re unrecognizable from the image you had of them in your head when you first held them. They do things that are stupid or cruel or embarrassing, but that bond between the two of you is supposed to help you through it. To be unbreakable.

  You end up doing things for your children you thought you’d never be capable of.

  I pull the gun out and check that the safety is on before tucking it back into my waistband and covering it with the expensive silk shirt I optimistically wore today, which is now singed and scarred with black streaks from the fire. When I get dressed in the morning, if I look in the mirror, my ribs protrude out like a set of jewels inlaid in a casket.

  Death is all around me. I see it everywhere.

  When I leave Mark’s corner of Granfield Manor I close the door as quietly as I can and wait for the heaviness on my shoulders to lift. It’s easier to pretend everything is okay when you’re not watching your husband waste away.

  There’s a rustling in the hall, somewhere down towards Margot’s room, which she’s still in. Tobias and I never moved her in with Mark. Tobias disappeared in the middle of the greenhouse burning, probably thinking of his dead wife, and I couldn’t face looking for him. The only thing I could do was let what had just happened sink in, and try to sort through it all. So Margot is staying right where she is.

  The rustling comes again, and I walk down the hallway towards the library room I’ve converted into an office. The door is ajar and someone is inside, moving things around.

  There’s a scrape of a chair against the reclaimed wood floor and the heavy scratch of a drawer opening in the desk. I swear that when I listen at night to the damp softness of this exquisitely expensive house, I can hear the whisper of book pages being turned.

  I wait, hoping to catch whoever is invading my personal space in the act. Felix has come banging around before, trying to get in. He didn’t come out with the fire to help, and I haven’t gone looking for him since. I have no clue where my son is, I realize.

  I reach back and feel the hard skeleton of the gun in my palm. You can never be too careful when you’re the only one in your family who realizes what’s really happening.

  I creep closer to the door, push it open with the palm of my free hand, and let the scene in front of me sink in.

  There they are, sitting in my chair, trying to take over my life and put me out of my misery at the same time.

  I hold the gun out, not a tremble in my arm—not even in the slightest—and poise my finger on the trigger. The pale blue of the computer screen gives their shoulders and chin an eerie glow, like they’re being lit from within.

  On the screen is the image of another person, looking out into our world. Dressed in black, a thick accent coloring their words as they bark out instructions across the feeble internet connection.

  “It will cost you,” the man in the screen says. “Are you willing to pay our price?”

  The figure in front of me nods in the affirmative, and starts to explain how they’ll get their hands on the money. I creep in further, and that’s when the man in the screen looks up. He sees me, and the gun, but fear doesn’t cross his face. Just a firm resignation.

  “Looks like you have bigger problems,” he says through lips that flatten into two rigid lines. His screen clicks off, and the glow turns to blackness.

  My adversary turns around in the chair, and it’s when I see their eyes ripe with fear that a tremble creeps into my grip.

  “I can explain,” they say. “It’s not what it seems.”

  Of course, I don’t believe them. But I do hesitate, like some amateur, and that’s all it takes for them to move on me and strip the gun away.

  “Are you listening?” they ask, my gun pointed straight at my head.

  36

  Felix

  I wake in my room. My head throbs like someone’s bouncing a kick ball against my right ear. The covers are pulled up to my chin, and I have to wriggle my arms around in order to get out of the tight sheets.

  As soon as I’m free, I jump out of bed. I need to get to Mom, or Daphne. Dad needs me.

  But I feel sick all of a sudden and have to grip at the table by my bed. Then I throw up onto the floor, which is just as awful as it sounds. The room spins around me. They must have hit me harder than I realized.

  Which means that they could do even worse to everyone else in the house. I slither across the floor towards my bedroom door. I hold on to the doorframe and try to pull myself up the side. My palms are sweaty from puberty or the concussion, or both, and my hands slip on the smooth wood.

  I’m a mess. Dad would be so disgusted with me.

  So would Mom.

  I take a deep breath and try to focus my eyes on a point in the distance. I can do this.

  When I step through the door I’m hit with a smell I don’t recognize. Tangy and metallic, like licking a battery that’s been supercharged. Whatever it is pricks at my spine, and the wooziness I felt a few moments ago is replaced with bright bursts of fear tracking through my nervous system.

  Because it’s blood. Of course, it’s blood.

  37

  Daphne

  I hate Margot.

  I hate her so much.

  That’s what I want to scream into everyone’s faces, but instead I came to see the horses. I like them. They don’t make me do things I don’t want to do. They never talk about me behind my back, or bring weird women into the house who want to watch me play with my toys. And, most important of all, they don’t kiss my mother when they’re not supposed to.

  Even though I’m short and maybe I have to go to bed early or else I start to get really cranky, I know about things.

  Jasmine tucks her head down from her stall and nuzzles my right ear. She can tell when I’m upset. That’s another reason I like the horses. They know when you aren’t feeling like yourself, or when you’re worried or upset. Jasmine and Julie do a better job than most of my family does.

  My stomach growls. I’m not hungry though. All Mom has been feeding us are beans and lentils and then beans again. My stomach feels like a balloon that’s going to burst.

  Jasmine’s huge horse lips snuffle against my cheek and I turn to scratch her behind her right ear. That’s her favorite place. I hear Julie and the other horses shifting in their stalls.

  “I’ll come pet all of you, don’t worry,” I tell them. I’d do it even if I had a lot of homework or chores or whatever to do, but I’ll especially be careful and get each spot for them because there’s nothing else to do.

  My tummy makes another weird sound. Ugh, it hurts. I have to stop petting Jasmine and grab ahold of my stomach and bend over a little.

  Maybe peanut butter sandw
iches don’t mix with beans? I think.

  I’d found the jar Mom stashed away after she caught me being rude to Margot that one day during breakfast. The strange thing is that I liked Margot for a long time. I even had a doll that kind of looked like her, and I would have her—the doll—sit at my table and pretend to have tea with all of my other stuffed animals. But then the doll went missing, or maybe I left it under the trees where I like to play, and I had to replace it with something else. Margot was nice and she took care of my dad really well. She wore these cool uniforms with different animals on them sometimes, and when I asked she’d let me listen to my heartbeat with her stethoscope. But then one night I had a nightmare and I went to Mom’s bedroom and Mom wasn’t there.

  I was going to go get Felix instead, but his stupid door was locked again, so I decided that Margot would be able to help. That’s when I found out about them, about my mom and the nurse. Apparently that’s almost as clichéd—I learned that word from Greta when she’d let me sit in the kitchen while she made dinner and watched her shows on the television—anyway, it’s almost as clichéd as Dad having an affair with the nanny, which we don’t have because Mom wants people to think she’s a superhero or something. Superwoman. I heard Greta say that too once.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Tobias startles me out of my tummy ache for a moment. He’s coming down from the hay loft that you can climb into from the back side of the stables. I keep my arms wrapped around my belly as I watch him, and the horses all move in their stalls because they know I don’t feel well. He was so quick to help me when this all began. I didn’t even have a chance to tell him to stop and to unwrap that awful blanket from my face. It smelled like the horses, but also like wild animals and poo and stinky breath, and it scratched at my face like the wool sweaters Mom makes me wear for the family pictures she has us take every year.