Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  There’s somehow only one bag of coffee beans left. And our labeled Pasta (GF) has a single sad bag of corkscrew pieces made from brown rice. I’d had the bright idea a little while ago that gluten might be bad for us, and so anything with a starchy stable shelf life seems to have been cycled out of Greta’s shopping routine for the most part.

  The fridge is well stocked for now, because Greta went to the store before she left to be with her mother. There are prepped cuttings of various green vegetables, and a huge bag of chopped kale mixed with collard greens. Two cartons of soy milk and a gallon of normal milk. Cheese, cold cuts, kombuchas and yogurts and two dozen eggs.

  And there’s the garden, I remind myself.

  It’s still dark outside, but a skein of light is starting to shade the edges of the pathways and trees. I look down at my list. It seems terribly meagre, considering we are alone out here for an indeterminate amount of time.

  And not only alone. Quarantined. Or we would be, if anyone found out that Darren was sick.

  I push the thought away and slip on a pair of shoes left by the door and pull an old wax coat hanging on a hook. I freeze for a second after I pull my arms through the sleeves, thinking that it must be Darren’s. That I’m infected now too. That I won’t be able to touch my children again. Or my husband.

  Or Margot.

  I force myself to take a breath, and shrug against the stiff fabric. It fits perfectly. The sleeves hit at my wrists, with a slight nip in the waist. This is a woman’s jacket.

  Darren wouldn’t have left his jacket here. Greta didn’t like him, to the point that I had to have a little talk with her a while back about everyone at Granfield being part of a family and needing to be kind to each other. She gave me a steely stare when I was finished, but things had gotten better after that. Still, there’s no way she would have welcomed him in for a chat and some warm scones.

  It must be a jacket I forgot I had. Or Margot’s, maybe?

  It doesn’t matter. As long as it’s not Darren’s.

  Fever-ridden and glassy-eyed, his face swims up in front of me like an unwelcome guest.

  He didn’t recognize me when Tobias and I came for him, I’m at least certain of that.

  The shoes slip off the backs of my bare feet as I walk from the kitchen door over to the greenhouse. I’m hoping that things are further along than I’d guess for this time of year.

  Maybe Tobias knows something about growing things, because I don’t.

  My phone pings inside the pocket of my pajama top, where I slipped it in when I got up from the couch outside Mark’s room. I tried to do some work, but the words on my laptop screen blurred in front of me. Everything will have to wait for now. He was asleep when I left.

  We made the children sleep in the panic room, and I have more cleaning to do before they can come out. Margot promised she would help.

  I pull my phone out and scan the series of messages coming in almost constantly. Since the lockdown order came I’ve been flooded with more and more frantic texts and emails from my staff, from my board, from investors. I’ve replied to a few of them, but I’m waiting a little longer before I respond to the rest.

  Chronos handles video conferencing tech, and it is going to come out of this pandemic just fine, I’ll tell them. People need us now more than ever.

  I let my eyes stay for a beat longer on the screen. There’s one message directed to me from Mark’s former business partner. It came in at 3am. I’ll have to read it later.

  There’s a small light out in the distance, more focused than the diffused glow of the coming dawn. It’s coming from Tobias’ apartment. I guess I’m not the only one who can’t sleep.

  There’s so much to do.

  I walk through the copse of trees that separates the main house from the gardens and greenhouse. On the air is the faint smell of charred wood and something else, more acrid and pungent. It’s a smell I remember from my childhood. I hope the wind carries it away from the house, because it’s not a smell any child should remember.

  I don’t see any light from where we set the fire across the hill, which means everything must have burned down by now.

  Granfield Manor has a huge greenhouse on the side of the property, close by but out of view of the main house thanks to a copse of ancient ash trees that grow along the furthest edge of the lake. The greenhouse was originally meant to grow orchids, but over the years it was converted into a hothouse for edible plants, with a seasonal garden carved out of the earth around it when the growing season began outside. It was in some disrepair when Mark and I first moved in, but we hired Darren and then Darren hired a team and it became something else. We’d apparently won a few blue ribbons at the county fair.

  I trip on a root spanning across the pathway and fall down onto my hands and knees. A few small rocks cut into the soft flesh of my palms, and the list I’ve brought with me crumples against the hard ground. I should have brought a flashlight.

  How am I going to make a list of all the plants if I can’t even see where they are?

  I scramble back up and move ahead again, not willing to waste the battery on my phone with its light turned on. I need to be more careful, moving through the dark.

  Finally, the path turns and I come out of the grouping of trees into a clearing. The ghostly structure of the greenhouse looms up ahead of me, like Miss Havisham waiting in her wedding dress. The ground around it is loamy and recently turned—I can smell the deep richness of the dirt. It smells like springtime, but a hundred times more powerful.

  I reach the door to the greenhouse and slip on one of the plastic gloves from Mark’s medical supplies. Tobias had difficulty fitting his hands into them last night, because I’ve only ever ordered smalls or mediums. It’s only ever been women taking care of Mark. Tobias will just have to make them work, and stretch them out so they’ll fit.

  Inside the greenhouse, there are rows and rows of tables covered in small green plants. It’s too dark to discern the starts sprouting in their tiny plastic and cardboard containers, and even if I had good lighting I wouldn’t know enough to identify anything beyond a tomato plant. I grip the list I’m making for Tobias and Margot of what we’ll have to eat for the next month. Months.

  I won’t go further than that when I talk to them.

  I won’t bring up the possibility of years. It’s too much to handle, for all of us.

  10

  Margot

  If I’d gone to be with Darren, I wouldn’t be here with Mark. Brenna would never allow it.

  And I need to be here with Mark. It’s the entire reason I came to Granfield in the first place. I couldn’t risk losing everything now, even if it meant that I couldn’t look myself in the eye this morning when I stood in front of the mirror and brushed my teeth, washed my face like it was any other morning, even though nothing could be further from the truth.

  I know they killed Darren. I’m not stupid. And there’s a small part of me that’s glad I didn’t need to be there and become a part of it, more than I already am a part of it by not doing anything. If I’d been there, monitoring him and assessing his symptoms to see how far along he was, I would have felt the need to stop Tobias and Brenna.

  And then maybe they would have done the same thing to me, days or weeks later, when I got sick.

  I don’t remember when I started talking to Mark. It must have been at least a few weeks after I came to Granfield Manor. Maybe more. It was lonelier than I thought it would be, and I couldn’t seem to quiet my mind at night. And then, in the mornings, I’d drag myself out of bed and go to Mark’s rooms to care for him. Take his blood pressure, check his pulse, give him his medications. Bathe him to prevent bed sores. I’d dress him in the soft cashmere or silk pajamas that lined his closet, depending on how chilled the room felt that morning, and then we’d have time to sit together.

  Brenna was already at the office. The children were at school. And Greta or the other staff wouldn’t come in unless I let them in to clean. I was one of
the few people who had a key card for this portion of the house.

  Tobias has one, although I can’t really understand why except that Mark wanted him to have it. Sometimes the noises of Mark’s monitors would drown out the beeps and other signals that the doors were opening, and Tobias would appear behind me with that hangdog expression of his, like he’d just heard the world was ending or they’d discontinued his favorite horse feed or something. I was never sure how much he overheard before he let me know he was there, but he never asked me about any of it and Brenna never brought it up, so maybe he didn’t hear anything.

  Today, the house is quiet even though it’s after 8am. I know the children are still in the panic room, comfortable and hopefully asleep. Brenna didn’t want them coming out yet, not until we’d sanitized everything again. After last night I can’t smell anything other than bleach. The house reeks of it because Brenna and I spent most of yesterday scrubbing everything—handles, switches, counters and railings. Anything that Darren might have touched if he’d happened to come inside at some point.

  Then we went outside to the shed where Darren kept his tools, and started spraying. We had masks from the medical supplies in Mark’s rooms, and gloves too. There was even a stack of gowns that Brenna had bought a while ago. We burned everything afterwards.

  We didn’t touch Darren’s apartment. Instead, Tobias went over and locked the door from the outside, so nobody could get in and somehow get exposed.

  We’ll have to put on new equipment today for the second and third rounds Brenna said she wants to do. But for now, I’m sitting with Mark, holding his hand and tracing the edges of the white bandage I taped over the long vertical cut on his wrist. I checked it this morning and changed the bandage. It’s healing nicely. It’ll barely leave a scar by the time all is said and done.

  “There’s a sickness spreading outside,” I tell Mark, although he’s not fully awake yet because the extra doses of sedative we’ve been giving him to help him sleep at night take a while to wear off in the morning. His arms and legs are free, thank God.

  Mark was calm and lucid yesterday, despite the panic saturating the house. I hope it means we did a good job pretending in front of him. He told a few jokes, and even with the speech distortions and the motor control of his mouth degrading, I could tell what the punchline was.

  “A horse walks into a bar, and the bartender asks, ‘Why the long face?’”

  For being such a tech wizard, he has really lame jokes.

  Brenna and I already agreed to not say anything about Darren, or about the children staying in the panic room. He might be able to smell the bleach on me when he wakes, but we’ll see if he asks about it. I’ve come in here smelling of lots of different things—cold winter wind from a walk out near the horse barns, spicy chilies from a dish Greta was trying out in the kitchen, his wife’s perfume on the nape of my neck and down my collarbone. I don’t know if the disease is affecting his sense of smell.

  Mark stirs a little as I keep talking.

  “Brenna was worried it was here. We had a pretty big scare last night. We had to burn a lot of things.”

  There’s a soft rustle as the heater kicks on, and warm air flows from the vent in the upper right corner of the room.

  “When I became a nurse, I did it because I wanted to help people.” Mark’s arm moves a little underneath my fingertips, a twitch of active nerve cells signaling from his brain, and I press a little harder to hopefully give a reassuring pressure on his skin. “I’ve taken care of people my entire life. I’m good at it.”

  My mother always wanted me to be a nurse. Sometimes I wonder if that’s where her problems came from—that maybe she justified all her weaknesses as a way of giving her daughters practice for the world outside our home.

  Mark’s eyes flutter open and he immediately locks his gaze onto mine. His eyes are still so piercingly blue, like I saw in those first magazine spreads. There’s a powerful man behind all these tubes and machines. I need to remember that.

  “Good morning,” he tells me. His mouth sounds dry, and I bring over a waiting glass of water for him to sip.

  “Better?” I ask.

  He licks his lips, which are only slightly cracked. I put some ointment on my finger and dab it onto his lower lip, so he can rub his lips together and spread it around.

  “How are you?” This is his standard question, but today it unnerves me and I have to turn and pretend to busy myself with the stand of gauze pads at the other end of the room.

  I blink back a few tears, and take a deep breath that I hope he doesn’t hear over the soft rustle of the heating above us. I wish for a machine to kick on and start filling the room with its noisy static.

  When I turn back, he’s not looking at me. His gaze is on the window, where a beam of light has burst through the clouds and streamed in to make a long rectangle of sunshine on the tiles near the entrance to the bathroom.

  “It’s going to be a beautiful day,” he tells me.

  I nod. There’s a beep from the other room as the keypad allows someone else inside this small sanctuary I’ve tried to build between us.

  “Of course it will be,” I tell him.

  11

  Tobias

  “What are you thinking about?” Colleen asks me. She’s on the beach where we went for our honeymoon in Jamaica. The sand is a white so bright that it seems to vibrate when you look at it.

  “You,” I say, because it’s the truth. All I can think about is her.

  She smiles, and her dark hair falls in front of her eyes as she dips her head towards her chest in that bashful way she has. “But what else?”

  “What else, what?” I ask her back, teasing a little. She likes it when I tease her.

  “You can’t just be thinking about me. There has to be something else going through your head.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you looked worried, a moment ago.” We’d loved each other a long time. My wife knew me better than anyone. Ever.

  “Did I?” I reach out to stroke her face, but my hand falls through the image of her and I’m left with an empty grip. I flex my hand.

  No, not an empty grip. I’m holding a shoe—not even a shoe, a boot with laces and a reinforced steel toe, the kind Darren would wear when he was working on the gardens—tight enough to make my knuckles pop up white as the sand. Colleen isn’t there anymore. Instead, next to me on the beach is a huge fire, the flames so tall they’re licking at the stars in the now-dark sky. I turn around, hoping to see her again. But there’s only darkness around me, outside of the fire’s light. Until a face looms over me, from out of the deep black of the ocean lapping close enough to spray my bare legs with saltwater.

  Bloodshot eyes. Red, pulpy skin pricked with beads of sweat.

  “Please,” Darren says, even though by the time Brenna and I got to him he wasn’t able to speak between his coughs. His mouth could only open into a silent scream that neither of us knew how to care for. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  I shoot up from the couch in my apartment, my body aching from falling asleep in the early morning after hours spent pacing and waiting for the bonfire to burn down. My shoulders ache from dragging the wood and tools into the fire pit. Brenna had been insistent. Everything we could get to that Darren may have touched, outside of his apartment, needed to be burned.

  She kept Margot inside the house, rubbing down every surface with bleach.

  “Don’t let Brenna fool you,” Mark had told me once, when we’d been chatting by the stables and I’d mentioned that he must feel really lucky to be married to such a kind and confident—I didn’t mention beautiful, because that was obvious to anyone who met her—woman. “She’s a killer.”

  He’d smiled, and I’d figured he was talking about her business life. I knew she ran some sort of tech company, but different from what Mark did. They were both ridiculously successful and wealthy.

  Maybe if she’d let Margot come and look at Darren, assess how sick he was and wh
at we could do to help him. Maybe things would have been different.

  Light streams through the windows in my small living room. It must be mid-morning by now, meaning that I slept for at least a few hours.

  My mouth feels fuzzy from the shots of whiskey I downed close to 3am, hoping to ease into some artificial calm. I wash my face in the tiny bathroom and run a toothbrush over my teeth. Indigestion burns up my throat from having only a few ounces of hard liquor in my stomach for the twenty-four hours or so.

  There’s a tightness in my chest that I ignore. We were very, very careful, I remind myself.

  I pull on a fresh shirt and rush out the door, realizing that Jasmine and Julie and all their friends must be anxious with hunger. My apartment is only a few yards from the stables, situated over the old mill barn. The manor used to grind its own flour, out at the mill-house near the dam on the edge of the lake. A few old mill wheels are still scattered inside, and their round hulks sometimes loom out from behind the windows like deformed ghosts, waiting for someone to finally let them out of their misery.

  The stable door is closed, which is a relief. In the haze of yesterday’s emergency, I couldn’t remember whether I’d closed it or not. I’m certain I fed the horses dinner, but a glance at my watch tells me it’s later than I thought and I’m well behind schedule for their normal breakfast.

  When I open the door, I’m met with soft familiar smells. Hay, weathering lumber, and the exhales of large animals waiting to be cared for.

  “I’m coming,” I assure them in tones meant for babies and horses.

  My dream from this morning creeps back into my thoughts. Colleen and I were going to have a baby. She was five months along, starting to show.

  I put the bucket of oats into Jasmine’s stall, and she nuzzles my arm with her soft velvet nose. Her ears are tipped forward, and her nostrils flare as she eats.