Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  I tie the one that Mark could have done himself.

  Before I drag my unconscious husband over to the window, I do a quick search of his pockets and retrieve the key card. I don’t have time to stop and think. I can only do.

  He deserves this, I tell myself. He shot you. Or he would have, had there been any bullets in the gun. He was ready to murder you.

  I ignore the small voice inside my head reminding me that it wouldn’t have been murder. It would have been self-defense.

  Daphne’s voice is closest. “Mommy! Daddy!”

  What have I done?

  I’m ready and poised at the windowsill. I’ve secured the sheet to the bed and it’s wrapped around Mark’s neck with a tight noose. All I have to do is lift him up and over, and then let go.

  Just let go.

  The doors to the outer room are opening. All the machines in Mark’s room are silent without a patient to monitor. I can hear Mark’s soft breathing and the whir of the locks loosening, about to let my children in.

  It has to be now.

  I lift Mark up, propping his torso on the edge of the windowsill and then lifting his legs over. He falls out the window and the sheet snaps tight around his neck. The bed holds steady. I can’t look over, but I hear scratching and realize he must not have fallen hard enough to snap his neck. I force the image of Mark’s legs flailing from the lack of air in his lungs out of my mind. He’s suffocating.

  And I’m standing here, looking at my children and my lover and this man I barely know, trying to make them believe that I had nothing to do with any of this.

  “Help me,” I cry out. “He’s dying!”

  51

  Tobias

  I grab the sheet and rip it up in big handfuls. It only takes a few seconds, but I’ve no idea how long Mark has been hanging there.

  Margot and I scramble to get it off his neck as Brenna corrals the children in a corner of the room, shielding what they can see with her body.

  He’s not breathing as we unwind the cloth from his neck, and Margot starts CPR on him in precise and practiced movements. She goes on for a minute, two minutes. Seconds stretch and pass by in long fuzzy gaps. She calls out to me to do certain things, like hold his legs or press down on his shoulders, and I do what I’m told.

  But I don’t take my eyes off Brenna for a second.

  52

  Margot

  This can’t be happening. I’m a good nurse. I’m capable and strong, and I can save him.

  I keep doing the compressions. I keep breathing into his mouth.

  I remember once, in nursing class, learning about a woman who did CPR on her husband for twenty minutes before he had a response. If she’d given up too soon, he’d be dead.

  She kept believing in her own ability to save him, and so she did.

  Thoughts scurry across my mind, and I can’t hold on to any of them except for counting inside my head. And the fact that I never got to tell him about my sister. I never got to thank him for loving her. Or to confront him about the night she died.

  He’d been the only thing, besides me and my other sisters, to get Teresa through our mother’s death. I remember her calling and telling me about this wonderful guy, smart and handsome and so very kind, who she’d been dating for a few weeks. This was maybe two or three months after Teresa had come home from college for a weekend visit and found our mother in the bathtub, a stream of vomit spread over her chest and her body cold and rigid. She’d finally taken enough pills to actually kill herself this time.

  I was already in high school, about to finish up my junior year. Our other sisters were in college or working. Debbie had gotten married right out of high school and was already a mom to a little baby girl.

  Teresa wouldn’t let me see Mom when I came home from soccer practice. Not like that.

  We buried her and moved on with our lives, or at least I thought. It hadn’t really come as a surprise to any of us. It felt more like an inevitability and, for me, a piece of relief too, that I didn’t have to worry about when it was coming anymore, asking myself when would Mom finally do it.

  I stayed with a friend of mine’s family for the next year until I graduated. My other sisters kept living their lives, but Teresa struggled. She was thinking about dropping out of school. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t focus on her studies. She’d come back to our little town every weekend to check on me, supposedly. But I knew she was also searching for something. Some explanation for what happened to our mother.

  I already knew. There was no answer. It just was. Our mother was sad. Very sad. And then she tried to die. And then she died. The end.

  But then Teresa had met Mark, and her life changed. Until one night, she called and left me a voicemail. I was already asleep, and when I woke up the next morning I listened to her message where she slurred her words as she sobbed into the phone, telling me that she was worthless. That Mark didn’t really love her, like our mother didn’t love her. That he’d been saying things about her, terrible nasty things.

  She was going to confront him. But first, she needed to go for a drive. Get some fresh air and space.

  She sounded drunk from the start of the message.

  As I finished listening to it there was a knock on the bedroom door, and my friend’s dad was outside it with a police officer in a uniform standing next to him.

  That’s how I found out my big sister had died in a car crash. A drunk driving crash.

  She was pegged by everyone as a typical result of a crazy mother and absentee father. And I swore I’d find Mark Stone one day, and I’d make things right again for my sister.

  And for me.

  So I keep pumping his chest.

  I was going to do it when he was so far gone that it wouldn’t be surprising or questioned. Give him a dose of medication that was a little too strong for his weakened heart, and he’d drift off into a dreamless sleep.

  I didn’t want him to suffer. Not really. I only wanted him to pay for his cruelty.

  And before I did it, I was going to tell him that I was Teresa’s sister. That I knew what he’d done to her. How he’d used her. And that he deserved what was coming to him.

  I’d convinced myself that I could do it, even though I’d had so many chances in the past to have him slip away without any suspicion on my part. I mean, he was trying to kill himself on a regular basis. I could have let one of those go too far, tend to him a little too late.

  But I couldn’t do it.

  Which is why I’m pumping his heart for him and breathing his breath for him.

  I’m not a killer. Not even for Teresa.

  Especially not for Teresa, I realize now.

  53

  Brenna

  Mark isn’t dead.

  Mark is dead.

  I don’t have time to figure out which is true. Margot keeps hunching over his chest and pressing life back into him, and I’m hugging my children close to me as though I’m a good mother.

  “You need to stop,” Tobias tells Margot. He puts a steady hand on her shoulder, but she won’t stop. “Margot, he’s gone.”

  “Not yet,” she tells him in between pulses on Mark’s chest.

  “He wanted to die,” Tobias says, so quietly that I almost can’t hear him. He’s trying to spare the children from hearing it, which is so absurd to me and at the same time so kind that I want to weep into their pale, frightened faces and tell them that the world isn’t all eat or be eaten.

  But the moment passes, as they always do. And I’m left with everything I’ve been planning these last several weeks, months, years in tatters and I need to figure out how I’m going to fix this. There’s no time for grief or regret. I need to keep going.

  “What’s happening?” I call out from across the room. “Mark! Is he going to be okay?”

  Felix grips me tighter and Daphne’s nails dig into my side.

  Tobias holds on to Margot’s arms and pulls her away from Mark’s body, which is starting to take on a cast to it that i
s different from the softness of someone who is breathing on their own. The sheet lies in a tangled mass, like a spider’s nest, in the corner underneath the window.

  Margot shouts and protests, kicking at Tobias and trying to pull herself free with her arms, but he holds firm and she eventually stops and settles into his hold. She turns to me, and our eyes meet for the first time since we’ve come together in this sick room.

  “I tried,” she cries out to me. “I tried to save him! I didn’t want him to die.”

  I can’t stop myself. Even though my children are clinging to me and my husband is lying dead just twenty feet from me, her words poke something inside my brain that won’t settle. I see an opening.

  “Why would you have wanted him to die? Why would you even need to defend yourself?”

  I move towards Margot, like a magnet’s pulling me along into this inevitability, and Felix steps away from me as I walk. A small sob escapes his mouth, which he promptly claps a hand over. I cast a sidelong glance his way. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” I tell my son. “I’m going to make everything better.”

  Daphne still has her arms wrapped around me, and when I look down her eyes are huge black disks of terror. Or excitement. Or a little of both.

  She’s always been my ally, ever since she came into the world, screaming like a banshee and not willing to tolerate anything other than total respect for her specialness. Daphne is absolutely her mother’s daughter.

  I wasn’t going to ask her to help me with the teas and the meals for her father, but she was so curious. Following me around like a little shadow. And with the habits of a magpie. One day I was in the medical wing with Mark, mixing up his special supplements, as they were, and she appeared out of nowhere. She’d gotten ahold of the extra key card I kept in our safe—how she figured out the combination we used back then I’m still not sure—and come in at her own leisure. She’s only seven, but she knew something wasn’t right with what I was doing, and so I told her she’d be my helper. I made sure to emphasize that I wasn’t asking her brother for help. It was only going to be her and me.

  And so she and I worked together, mother and daughter, a perfect team. Until Tobias told me about the fox, sliced open in the stables. In the medical ward, while her father slept, I’d told Daphne about protection. About how to defend herself. We’d practiced those moves, cutting into the air. In case someone ever came, I told her, she would know how to protect herself. But hearing about what she did to that animal—that’s when I knew I’d gone too far with her. I hadn’t just made her fierce and ready for battle in this world of men. I’d made her a killer, someone who does it just for the sake of dominating someone or something else. I’d made her a liability.

  “What are you talking about?” Margot cries out. I watch Tobias’ grip on her shift slightly. He’s still holding her back, but he changes the position of his hands so he’s also almost pushing her out, towards me.

  “What did you do?” I say. I’m so close to her that I can see the beads of sweat on her forehead from the pressure she put on Mark’s chest to try to resuscitate him. “What have you done?”

  “Nothing! I was only trying to help.”

  “She poisoned me,” Daphne says. She’s turned her face against my legs, and her chin is pressed into my thigh so tightly that her chin wobbles against the muscles of my leg as she tries to talk. “Margot put something in my juice, and I almost died.”

  I hit Margot’s face. The face that I held so close to mine, kissing the soft skin of her collarbone. The tender corners of her eyes and mouth. I slap her hard, and a welt appears on her face almost as soon as I connect with her skin.

  I haul back, ready to strike again, when I notice Tobias. Something is off. He’s pulling Margot back, away from me, and inserting himself in between us.

  “Hold on to her,” I shout out into the void of the room. “She hurt my daughter. She killed my husband!”

  “Stop it,” Tobias growls. He looks at Daphne, then at me. “Get away from her.”

  “You said Darren did it to you.” Felix has crept from the corner of the room. He won’t turn his eyes to look at me directly, because then he’d have to take in his father’s body. I want to wrap my arms around him and promise that everything will be okay, and then have him drift off into a different world where he doesn’t have to see any of this. My tender, patient, weak little boy.

  “No, I didn’t.” Daphne shakes her head. “I never said that at all. It was Margot!” Her face looks flushed as she points a tiny finger at our resident nurse.

  “Stop lying!” Felix runs over and grabs his sister off of me. He pushes her to the ground, straddling her tiny body. “Stop pretending this is a game! What did you do?” He slaps her across the face, to all of our horror, like I slapped Margot a few moments ago.

  Daphne starts to cry. Felix stays on top of her, not turning his body towards the corner with the window. He raises his arm again, and before I can reach out to stop him or Tobias can work his way from Margot over to the two of them, he clenches his fingers into a fist and swings down in an arc towards his sister’s face.

  54

  Daphne

  I don’t think Felix really wants to hurt me. He saw Darren come through the open door, the one Tobias forgot to close when we found Daddy. All the grown-ups were distracted.

  I wanted to keep them that way.

  I don’t want to help Mommy ever again.

  She taught me how to lie, and I’m really good at it. Sometimes I lie without even thinking about it, just because I can. Mommy taught me how to hurt other people. But I don’t want to do any of that anymore. I want to be a good girl.

  Because if I’m a good girl, maybe Daddy will sit up and come back and read me stories about dancing princesses and men who try to figure out where they go at night. That’s how I knew to let the juice dribble down my chin. Like the princes who didn’t drink the special potion and were able to follow the princesses into their secret dancing hall in the middle of the night.

  That’s why I pretended like I was really sick outside, because Mommy wanted to hurt me too. She thought I hadn’t seen her do it, but I was watching longer than she thought as she got the juice out and the glass. I’m really good at sneaking around, too.

  I couldn’t let her hurt me.

  Felix is pretending like he’s going to hit me, so all the grown-ups are looking at us and they won’t see Darren getting ready in the corner. I hope he’ll forgive me for what I said in the stables, because I think he’s the only one who can make Mommy stop.

  55

  Darren

  Brenna doesn’t see me yet.

  It’s different from how it felt when she came to me, almost a year ago, wanting more than just attention. Wanting help. Right now she doesn’t see me because Felix is creating a distraction. But back then, she didn’t see me, not really, because I wasn’t a person to her. I should have known from the beginning that she didn’t think of me as anything other than a tool that she could use and then discard. I wasn’t anything beyond the purposes she saw me serving.

  I was out in the greenhouse, working on getting the gardens ready for spring—last spring—when she knocked on the metal door and asked me if I’d mind if she watched me work. I didn’t, and I said so, and then she took a seat and started saying these things, wild and exciting and dangerous things from my past that we’d never talked about before, even during those times when the corners of her eyes would soften as we lay together afterwards and I’d think “This is was what trust looks like”. And then it was her asking me for help. She knew I was on my own, that my daughter had died from that awful disease that no one could do anything about—leukemia—and that my wife and I had split up for good afterwards. I’d gotten mixed up in some messes after that. Drunk driving, some drug selling to make ends meet, and I got to know who the powerful bad people around the area were. My mother was a Russian immigrant, and so I could speak their language pretty well, which helped.

  I’m good wi
th my hands, and it seems like all sorts of people need someone like that—rich and poor, good and bad. They all need someone who knows how to make things work. Before I came to Granfield, I was deep inside with some of them, getting their handiwork done and some not-so-handy work too. But I couldn’t live with myself anymore, and so I came here.

  I won’t say my former bosses were happy about it, but they also weren’t going to stop me. I told them I just needed some time, and that I’d come back some day. When I said it I didn’t think it was true, but then Brenna came around with her pearly teeth and her tailored-to-within-an-inch-of-her life finesse and she told me she needed my help.

  Tobias is great with horses, just ask the bruise swelling on the back of my head from where Jasmine’s jaw caught me. But he’s terrible at knots. It only took me a few seconds to wriggle loose from them once I woke up.

  I have the shotgun tucked under my arm, the one Tobias used to hide in the stables until he asked me to hide it in my apartment. The one that brought Brenna’s first plan crashing down when he fired it at a few of my friends the night they tried to kidnap Mark. The one Felix almost found when he came snooping, before I distracted him with that whole mess of water and steam in my bathroom.

  It’s loaded, ready to aim and fire, but I don’t want it to come to that. I’m hoping I can be persuasive without having to hurt anyone.

  I’ve done enough of that in my lifetime.

  Felix is going to hit Daphne again. I feel sick to my stomach, even though I’m certain they’re only fighting in order to give me an opening. I hear Felix’s hand connect with Daphne’s face again, and the soft snap of his skin against her cheek makes me want to throw up.