Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  “It’s over, Brenna.” I hoist the gun up on my shoulder, careful to keep everyone in my view. Margot and Tobias don’t understand yet what’s going on, and I don’t have time to explain, because my friends are coming very soon.

  I’ve set things in motion and there’s no turning back.

  Brenna twists from her children and takes me in, her eyes turning from the terror-filled look she put on for her kids into that nasty coolness I remember glimpsing in the stairwell when Granfield was under attack, and Mark had a gun pointed to his head.

  Oh, Mark. I can’t bring myself to glance over to him in the corner. He was a good man. He was the kind of man I wanted to be.

  He didn’t deserve any of this.

  “Drop the gun,” Brenna says. “Drop the gun, Darren, and we’ll do as you say.”

  I’d expected this. Brenna is a master of making people believe what she wants them to.

  “Good. No one else needs to get hurt,” I say calmly. “Step away from the children, Brenna. You already killed Mark. I won’t let you hurt them too.”

  I don’t take my eyes off her, but I call out to Margot and Tobias, who are standing close together still, and watching all of this unfold. “The two of you need to take the children and get out of here. Now.”

  I press on the last word, trying to say it in a way that won’t scare Felix and Daphne any more than they already are.

  Brenna holds up her hands and moves away from everyone else, towards the shelves and bathroom door. Felix stands and reaches his arm to his sister, who grabs it and lets him lift her.

  “I don’t understand,” Margot says. “What the hell is happening?” She shifts her head from the children to Brenna to me, and back again. “Who’s coming? Brenna, what’s going on?”

  I try to explain. “My friends are coming to burn down Granfield. We need to get out of here.”

  Tobias holds on to the kids and makes his way to the door with them. Brenna isn’t moving, but her body is coiled, all pent-up energy waiting to burst. “What friends? Why are they burning Granfield down?” Tobias’ voice sounds fragile, and he clears his throat a few times before he can get the words out.

  “Do you want to tell them, or do you want me to?” I ask my partner in crime, who was never a partner. Brenna shrugs, a small movement that barely registers.

  “There’s nothing to tell.” She hoists her chin up into the air. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, but please—don’t hurt the children.”

  “I’d never hurt them,” I remind her. “You know that.”

  Tobias and Margot are almost to the door, but they have to walk by Mark’s body with the children and Tobias hesitates and scans the room, as though suddenly there will be a new path for him to take in this crowded violent space.

  And that’s when I do it. I look away for a second, tracing the outline of Mark’s corpse with my gaze and trying to think of a way for the children to be safe and not have to see their father’s dead body as they get there.

  Brenna pulls out the handgun she must have taken from Mark. The one I should have figured she had as soon as I saw his limp body on the ground.

  Now we’re in a standoff, with our weapons raised at each other.

  “You said that no one would get hurt,” I remind her. “You said that it was just a way to get more money from Mark’s company, in order to save your own. The kidnapping ransom would be enough to pay off the guys, give me a nice bonus, and then fix all your problems. You knew—you knew how in debt I was after my little girl was sick, and you took advantage of it.”

  I feel the weight of the lives behind me, the children and the nurse and the horse whisperer. I can’t let them get hurt any more than they already are.

  “But then it came to the actual night, and I saw what you were really capable of. I saw you on the stairs that night, when Tobias got me from my apartment and told me we needed to rescue your family. I came, planning to fix it somehow that they got away, but then you were on the stairs and the look on your face was so satisfied, so greedy for what that thug was about to do that I knew there was never a plan to kidnap Mark. You were always going to kill him. So when Tobias fired in self-defense, I followed his lead.”

  I can’t help it. I look at Mark’s body. “And now Mark is dead, because of you.”

  She ignores my accusations. Margot and Tobias hold on to the children, both of them scanning the room between Brenna and me like they’re spectators to some horrifying tennis match.

  “So why’d you stay on for so many more months?” Brenna asks me. “Why didn’t you turn me in if you knew my husband’s life was in danger?”

  “I was a fool, and a coward.” I won’t keep it inside any longer. There’s no point in trying to hide who I am. “I convinced myself that maybe Mark was really sick, and that you were changed somehow and dedicated to caring for him. That was easier for me to believe, instead of having to face that I didn’t go to the police or tell the truth because I wasn’t willing to go to prison for what I’d done. I wanted to keep my pathetic small life here at Granfield.”

  “And then you got sick, and it was the perfect way to get rid of you,” Brenna goes on. “Right? That’s what you want us all to think, isn’t it? That I somehow made up this illness and this quarantine just so that I could get rid of you.”

  “No one thinks that,” Margot says from across the room, a sudden hard edge to her voice. “We wouldn’t have stayed here, locked away for weeks and almost starving, just because you told us to. We saw the news reports, we got the alerts on our phones. We couldn’t contact our families because their towns were dealing with it even worse than we were, and the cellular service was disrupted. There’s no way you could have faked all of this for us.”

  “But she did,” I tell them all. “Brenna made it all up.”

  56

  Felix

  Something breaks inside my head and I can’t see for a minute, and then it all comes back in a rush of terrible, horrible things.

  Dad lying there, his lips blue and looking up at me but not seeing me.

  Tobias tries to shift his body in front of mine, blocking my view, and I feel more than see Margot doing the same thing for Daphne, but Tobias isn’t tall enough if I stand on my tiptoes. I’ve grown over the last few weeks, and I can still see everything that’s happening in this room where my father was supposed to be getting better and coming back to life.

  Mom’s hunched over in the corner like some creature from the movies I like to watch, trapped and waiting to bite. It was how the fox looked, when I caught it in the snare I set in the back field. I didn’t want it bothering the horses anymore. Nipping at their legs in the dark.

  It really bothered Daphne.

  Darren’s going to shoot her. He’s going to shoot Mom.

  I need to do something. But it’s like Margot all over again. I’m frozen in place. Daphne squeezes my hand, and I can’t even do that. I can’t even squeeze back to lie to my sister so she thinks it’s going to be okay.

  Because it’s not. Not ever again.

  And even though there are things that can be done to help, I know there’s nothing I’ll be able to do to fix it. Because I’m like my father, jumping out the window to get away from his problems and leaving us all here, alone.

  I’m a coward.

  57

  Brenna

  “I’ll explain everything later. Just get them out of here!” Darren barks, and Margot and Tobias seem to wake from a daze. Margot slips a key card out of her pants pocket and the insistent click of the key reader unlocking and opening the door echoes through the room.

  But I don’t want them to leave. I don’t want them to leave me alone with Darren. And, even more potent, churning underneath everything that’s happened in this life of mine, I don’t want my children to see me like this, defeated by some farmhand.

  They need to know that I was powerful. That I was in control. It might be the last lesson I ever teach them. I can’t let their final thoughts of me
be that I was weak.

  “Darren’s right,” I say. “I made up the quarantine.” It must be a testament to how much they’ve already been through today, because nothing shifts across the faces of Tobias and Margot. Daphne and Felix stare at their shoes, like they can’t hear me. So I keep going.

  “There is a virus, and there was the order across the country to shelter-in-place, but there’s still food in the grocery stores and hospitals are open. People can even get their food delivered, or order clothes online to wear in front of whoever they’re sheltering with, like a new suit of armor against this microscopic invader. We were never going to starve, and we didn’t have to be alone, out here waiting for it all to end.”

  Margot speaks first, like I knew she would.

  “Why?” she murmurs, not making eye contact with me.

  Tobias looks up and stares at me dead on. I stare right back. I’m not afraid of him.

  “Because I needed Granfield Manor to feel isolated and disconnected from resources. It’s the same thing you do when you need to acquire a competing company. You create discord in their own organization, so they start to eat away at each other from the inside, and then when everything is ready to crumble, you swoop in with an offer that’s well below asking price and come out the winner. I needed all of you to turn on each other. To start suspecting the others of trying to hurt you. After I convinced you all that Darren was sick and contagious, and he was dead thanks to Tobias—he was supposed to be dead—it became that much easier to pit you and Tobias against one another.”

  “I took care of Margot,” Tobias growls. “I carried her across that field and I dressed her wounds.”

  “Did you?” I ask him. “Because, on my count, Margot broke several ribs under your watch, and you were the one who discovered that bloody altar in the woods. Somebody killed a fox in your stable, sliced it through the neck with medical precision, you said, and then the greenhouse burned down without any witnesses. It wasn’t that hard to spread fear. It’s what human beings are built for—keying in on those tiny clues from other people that something is off. That you’re in danger.”

  Felix doesn’t move, but Daphne has lost interest in her shoes and her eyes meet mine in two whirling pools of blue. I’ve never seen her look so lost. My girl, the tough angel I molded.

  “Plus, there was the added benefit that Tobias had a criminal background, like Darren.” I scan Margot’s face, and a riptide of shock moves over her features. She didn’t know, which is good. “He tried to kill the man his wife was sleeping with. Not quite the same as Darren’s drug kingpin helper, but it would be enough on paper to make anyone suspicious.”

  Darren holds the gun at me level and steady, but he doesn’t seem to be so rushed anymore. In the past, before everything went to hell, he always seemed to like when I talked.

  “Let’s go,” Margot says, gripping Daphne’s hand and holding on to her own side as she steps through the open doorway. “You shouldn’t hear this. This isn’t right. We need to go!”

  I can’t believe I slept with her. And now she’s touching my daughter.

  “And Margot, you look exactly like your sister. I can’t believe you thought you could come here and care for my husband and think that neither of us would recognize you. I knew who you were from the moment I hired you. Your last name is common enough—Miller—but your dark hair. Those cheekbones. Of course you were Teresa’s sister. And you were so terribly overqualified to come and work here as a nurse to one patient. It was like you’d fallen into my lap, just when I needed you. So, when this is all over, even the kindly, compassionate nurse won’t be above the police considering her a murderer too.”

  Margot’s face goes pale. “What do you mean, I look like my sister?”

  “I knew her—we were friends, in fact—when she was dating Mark. Of course, that didn’t last for long, did it?”

  Her mouth opens and closes, but no words come out.

  I keep going, because I don’t have time to wait for what I’ve said to register in Margot’s mind fully.

  I tell this last part to my children. To Daphne, in particular, because Felix won’t look at me. “It was all going to plan. You see, I built something in this world.” I crouch down, so I’m level with my daughter. I steal a glance up at Felix, and he swings his eyes towards me for a few moments before blinking them away again. “My company has changed the lives of so many people. It helps keep families together, you see? It brings people closer. It changed the world, and it showed other women—girls like you, sweetheart—that they could be leaders too. But it was in trouble, because of some bad people.” I leave out the part where I made some poor investments and avoided some user privacy protocols, and the millions of dollars in fines we’d accrued because of it.

  “I needed to save it, for the other women out there who were counting on me lifting them up. I couldn’t let them get hurt because I failed. Do you understand?”

  Darren takes a deep breath, and his nostrils flare as he exhales. He’s letting me finish. He’s going to let me finish.

  “So I was willing to sacrifice everything to help the people who needed me. And I knew you would, too. You’d want to help.”

  “I love helping you, Mommy,” Daphne’s voice sounds so small compared to mine. “I always do what you tell me.”

  “Is that why you poisoned her?” The words scratch out of Felix’s mouth like sandpaper. He seems surprised that he even spoke.

  So my boy figured it out. Of course he did.

  “I needed you both to help me, so that I could save the company,” I say it meekly, and I feel the weight of it as the words come out. But I don’t regret it. They have a right to know that, even though I loved them, I couldn’t protect them from the way the world works.

  Tobias hasn’t moved an inch since I started. He’s listening too, like Darren. I’ve always had a power over men. “So you were going to kill your husband and your children, and place the blame on us? Why?”

  “I needed a clean slate. I need all of Mark’s money in order to save my company. I can’t split it with the children—it would stay in trust for at least fifteen years for both of them.”

  “You did it for money.” Darren emphasizes the last word.

  “I did it for the future,” I snap back.

  “When everything was finished, all of you with your crimes and dangerous backgrounds would be blamed for what happened here at Granfield. I’d be the victim of your horrible plan—whether it was Margot taking down all Mark’s family and friends in order to get revenge, or Tobias not being able to handle the pressures of life outside prison and contain his violent rages. Or, maybe Darren’s buddies came for revenge, as payback for abandoning them. There were so many different options, thanks to your messy lives. Any of those would have worked, depending on how it all played out. But in the end, I’d be left alone, and I’d be able to save myself.”

  I say it, but I don’t feel the words anymore. Daphne has started to cry. Felix stares at a corner of the ceiling.

  You can always have more children, I remind myself. They deserved to know.

  “That’s enough,” Darren decides. He moves to the door, shotgun still leveled at me, and as I watch from the side I see my children, my lover, and my only friends leave me locked here, with my dead husband by my side.

  58

  Darren

  “Get to the panic room!” I shout. I have to risk leaving Brenna there, locked in. I need to make sure they get to the room safely.

  Because the string of windows along the hallway tells me it’s already happening.

  Four long shiny black SUVs are parked in the gravel lot behind the house. There’s the sound of scraping outside along the walls.

  They’re here, and they’re setting it all up. Kindle and flame. Gasoline soaking into the foundation of the house. They’ll be thorough. After last time, they’re not letting anything go to chance.

  If we go outside, they’ll shoot us. No witnesses. They kept telling me that, whe
n we’d meet on Brenna’s laptop. I risked getting caught, time and time again, to use the terrible things I’ve done to do one thing right, until she finally did catch me.

  The panic room is fireproof, with its own special supply of air, like it was always inevitable that Granfield would burn.

  Felix whimpers as we race to the solid metal doors seated inside the center of the house. He’s been so quiet for most of this, but now a dam seems to be breaking and everything inside of him pours out.

  I used to do that when I was a kid. I still do it now, alone in my apartment before all of this, thinking of my little girl and the cancer that ate away at her body until she wasn’t much more than a shell of the happy, round and bouncing baby that she once was. When she died, she was three, but looked like she was maybe twelve, eighteen months and like she’d been through a famine and a civil war. Which she had, in a way. Her body fighting itself. I couldn’t do anything besides sit in that molded plastic chair and hold her to me. There was no magic, no strings that my rich criminal friends could pull, no people to know that could save her.

  But today, I can correct that past a little. I can save Felix and Daphne. I can make sure their mother never hurts them again. After the fire, no one will come looking for them to settle scores or take their money. They’ll be safe. They can live good normal lives after this.

  We’re almost there. The clangs and crashes from what the men are doing outside won’t reach them once they’re inside the room. It’ll be peaceful in there.

  A loud crunch of metal against metal splits the air, and we all flinch at the sudden burst of sound. I don’t dare to glance out of the window, because I know what the rising noise means. Granfield is made of stone, and so they knew to use the machines from the farm shed, and where the keys were, to drive them to the house and knock holes in the foundations. They’ll set the flames in those pockets, and then watch the building, and everyone in it, burn.