Isolation: a gripping psychological suspense thriller full of twists

by Sarah K Stephens

  When I looked out the window of my apartment by the bed, I saw the bonfire smoldering. Tobias had been clever. He’d tossed in some of my clothes at the edge, so they’d char a little but still be visible. Brenna would believe that the rest of me had been eaten by the fire.

  She was there, staring at the flames and covering her face with the sleeve of her sweatshirt to keep the smoke out. Looking at her face, that’s when I knew we were over, if there ever even was a we. Because Brenna stared at the fire, and she smiled.

  Not a little smile, like she was thinking of something small and beautiful to help her deal with the tragedy surrounding us. Not like she was recalling a memory she held close to her and went to in times of awfulness, like I hold on to the memories of my little girl—and which I’ve had to use to help me a lot these last two weeks.

  No, she was smiling like she’d just finished a marathon and she had the numbers called out on TV for the lottery and been told by the most wonderful person that she was the one for them.

  She was smiling like a winner.

  “Why didn’t you come back to the house?” Tobias asks me, but he knows as soon as he says it that it’s a stupid question. Of course I didn’t come back. The woman in charge had told him to kill me in order to supposedly keep her family safe. She wasn’t going to stand for me sauntering up, supposedly cured and ready to help again.

  Of course, Tobias doesn’t know the other reason Brenna wanted me dead.

  Margot murmurs in the background. Felix moves a little to my right, and I realize I’d almost forgotten he was there. It must be hard, being so easily ignored by people.

  And maybe sometimes an advantage too, I think.

  “Did you set the greenhouse on fire?” Felix asks, and I flinch at the sound of his voice. He’s so pale, with dark rings under his eyes. He reaches up and rubs his head at the back.

  “Does your head hurt?” I tried to be as gentle as I could. Maybe if I’d been harder, he would still be safely up in his room.

  “Answer the question,” Tobias chimes in.

  “No, I didn’t.” I loved those plants. I love the idea of helping life grow. I’d never burn them down.

  “What about the fox?” Tobias asks next. “What have you been living on?”

  “What fox?” I have no idea what he’s talking about, and Margot’s face tells me she’s just as clueless. “I had food in my cupboard. All of you were avoiding my apartment, so I was able to get in and out pretty easily when I needed something. That is, until this one showed up, wanting my key card.” I nod towards Felix, and the poor boy promptly turns a bright red.

  “I didn’t know you had one. It was a hunch,” he explains.

  Tobias shakes his head. “What do you mean?”

  Felix squares his shoulders towards me. “You hit me, didn’t you? You’re the one who knocked me down and then put me in my room?”

  I don’t say a word. I focus on my breathing, keeping it steady and strong.

  Behind me, Daphne whispers something to Margot.

  Tobias repeats, “What do you mean?”

  Felix points his finger at me, and a slight tremble appears at the tip of his index finger. “He knocked me unconscious, just before Margot had her attack. And before Daphne ended up outside, almost dead too.”

  “I didn’t do anything, except try to keep you safe,” I tell Felix. I tell all of them.

  Tobias grips the shovel tighter. I sense Margot standing up behind me.

  “Daphne says Darren did it. That she saw him set the greenhouse on fire. And that he’s the one who poisoned her,” Margot tells our group.

  Fury spreads across Tobias’ face and blood pounds in my ears.

  I explain. “Brenna did it. She’s not who she seems to be.”

  But before I can continue, Jasmine’s heavy head whips up and down, slamming into the crown of my head, and I crumple to the ground.

  “Good girl,” I hear Tobias say. “Good girl.”

  48

  Mark

  Brenna stares back at me with a mixture of outrage and dread.

  “Give it to me,” she demands, as though I’m one of the kids. Or one of her employees. Like she expects me to submit to her, even though I know she’ll kill me the instant she has the chance.

  My body throbs all over, but there’s an energy to it that seems to propel me forward. My weakness from what my wife’s done to me these last few months has transformed into something else. I picture Daphne and Felix’s faces, and know that I have to do it now.

  I reach for the gun Darren tucked between the mattresses of my bed, I’m assuming to store for safekeeping until he came back for it. I pull the gun out and aim it at my wife.

  “It’s over,” I tell her. A wave of sadness, sudden and disorienting, rips through me like a current through the ocean, and then it’s gone. I don’t have time to grieve the loss of my marriage, or the betrayal of someone who I promised to love forever. I can’t think about how Brenna has decided to ruin me, body and soul, to save her company.

  For money and prestige.

  Instead, I have to focus on pointing this weapon that we chose together at her as precisely as possible, and what I’m going to do next if she refuses to follow my orders. Or, even more importantly, what I’m going to do if she listens.

  Brenna puts her hands up, as if in surrender.

  She still looks as though she could cut me apart with her eyes, but she steps away from the door. It doesn’t pass without my notice that, by stepping further from the door, she’s also moved closer to me.

  “I know,” she tells me. She takes another step away from the exit.

  “Don’t come any closer.” I hold the gun and click back the hammer.

  “Are you really going to shoot me?” Brenna asks. “I’m the mother of your children. Your wife. You love me. And think about what people will say. What they’ll think. You’ll go to prison, and then our children will be parentless. You’ll ruin everything.”

  “Yes, I’m going to shoot you.” But my words come out hollow and unmoored. I’ve always been a terrible liar. It’s Brenna who had the gift for “wordplay”, as she called it, which I can see now was really just the ability to manipulate others.

  “I don’t think you are.”

  Brenna moves towards me, so close that I can see the scar on her forehead from when she was a little girl. The fire was caused by faulty electrical wiring, they found out later. She had to go live with her grandmother, after her parents’ funerals. She had nothing left, because all her toys and clothes and photos from when she was little burned up in the fire.

  “It made me who I am today”, she’d told me as we lay under the covers in my dorm room, holding tight and trying to ease each other from our own private griefs. I’d lost Teresa just a few weeks before. Getting that phone call in the middle of the night telling me that my girlfriend had died in a car accident was the first time the world showed me that it was anything other than a wonderful place. I was almost a grown man.

  For Brenna, she knew that truth even before she could tie her own shoelaces.

  We each have our moments of reckoning, I suppose. Mine should have been losing Teresa, I realize now. But it wasn’t. I still trusted in the goodness of people. In the rightness of the world. Teresa’s death was an accident, it wasn’t the status quo of life.

  But now, pointing a gun at my wife of fifteen years and having to decide if I’ll make my children motherless, or let them lose their father, it’s never been clearer to me that the world is a terrible violent place.

  “Do it,” Brenna taunts me.

  And so I do.

  49

  Margot

  I pull back Darren’s eyelids and his pupils respond to the light on my phone. His breathing is steady and deep enough. He has a welt forming on the side of his head, but other than that he seems to be dozing in a worriless sleep.

  I turn my gaze to Daphne, who is looking less and less pale by the minute, but who still holds her arms over he
rself like a wild animal has cornered her. We’ve tied Darren’s hands and feet together and pulled him into an unused stall towards the back of the stable, but none of that has changed the way Daphne holds herself.

  Felix rubs at the back of his neck.

  Tobias doesn’t have any visible wounds, but as soon as we finished moving Darren into the stall he went back and grabbed the shovel, its head poised high above his shoulder.

  My ribs and head ache. My throat burns.

  So many of us here at Granfield are damaged, I think.

  “We need to find Mom and Dad,” Felix says.

  I see Daphne shake her head, slightly.

  “Tobias can stay with Darren,” I reason. “I’ll go with Felix back to the house.”

  “No!” Daphne shouts. “No, we have to stay together.”

  “We need to make sure Mom and Dad are safe,” Felix says to his sister. “No one has seen them in a long time. And we don’t know what Darren might have done to them.”

  A shudder flashes up my spine. I think of the altar under the tree that Brenna told me about. The bloody doll. Why would Darren do that?

  My hands shake as I bring them to my face and run them through my hair, trying to think. It was Daphne who gave me the coffee, she’s the one who wanted me to have an allergic reaction.

  Or was it Brenna?

  There’s no way Darren could have done that, could he? But had Darren been inside the house? And why was Daphne looking so normal already. She hasn’t vomited or anything, and her pupils and breathing are back to normal. It’s almost like she was faking.

  What did Darren really do to her, if anything?

  “Daphne,” I snap, harsher than I mean to be. “Who helped you make the coffee for me?”

  Daphne stares at her feet. “No one.”

  Felix interrupts. “We need to go, now! We need to find Mom!”

  “Why did you do it?” I lean closer to her little cherub face. “Why did you try to hurt me?”

  “That’s enough,” Tobias says and steps between us. “She’s traumatized, can’t you see that?” He turns to me. “And you’re badgering her about some sort of nonsense.”

  “I almost died!” I want to scream at how absurd it feels to have to justify my anger at almost dying less than two hours ago. “If it weren’t for Felix, and Darren too,” I add, “I would be dead. I would have asphyxiated from an allergic reaction, and died.”

  Tobias backs off. “I didn’t know. Are you okay?”

  I ignore him and look at Daphne, but she avoids my gaze.

  “Why, Daphne?”

  The horses don’t like any of this.

  “What’s going on?” Felix asks his little sister, raising his voice again. “What did you do?”

  The horses don’t like any of this.

  Daphne twists her hands in her lap.

  “I saw her kissing Mom.” Her words have no weight. They are as light as air, coming from her small child voice, and yet it’s like a bomb exploded in the room and all the oxygen has been sucked out from the aftershock.

  “What?” Felix says. It’s like a live electrical wire is connected to his feet, but it hasn’t grounded itself yet. He’s all energy, coiled and ready to leap, but without an endpoint.

  I can’t believe I was so stupid. My sisters, my family—they would be so ashamed.

  Tobias won’t look at me. Daphne stares ahead, a small curve turning up the corner of her mouth. “I saw her kissing our mother,” she repeats.

  She goes on. “It’s not right. Mommy and Daddy love each other. But if Mommy kisses Margot, then she and Daddy won’t be together anymore and we’ll have to go somewhere else and we won’t be able to see each other or stay at our same school or with our friends or live in the same house. That’s what happened to Tommy Winger at school, and now everyone hates him and he kind of smells and he’s always sad.”

  “So you decided to kill Margot!” Felix springs into action, flailing his arms and kicking out his legs. He grips his sister by the shoulders and shakes her violently for a few seconds, until Tobias and I pry him off.

  Daphne is terrified and bunches herself into a ball on the ground.

  “You’re stupid, so stupid!” Felix shouts at his sister.

  “That’s enough.” Tobias stands in the middle of the stables. “We need to get out of here. We need to find Brenna and Mark.”

  He turns to me. “Are you okay?”

  I nod.

  “All four of us will go. Darren is fine where he is. I’ve got him tied tight to the post. We’ll come back and check on him once we find your mom and dad.”

  Tobias walks out of the stable doors, and the three of us follow silently behind him.

  I stay towards the back, not willing to give anyone the advantage over me again.

  As we walk to the big house, I see Felix hesitate—reaching out, and then back, and then out again—to offer Daphne his hand. After a moment’s pause she takes it. The two of them, brother and sister, hold on to each other as they walk to the main house, in search of their parents.

  50

  Brenna

  Mark shoots the gun pointed straight at my chest. He pauses a second, as though he can’t believe what’s happened.

  But the gun was never loaded. I’m not stupid enough to keep a firearm around two young children with bullets loaded in it. It was more the threat of it—the look of it—that I needed. Plus, despite what you see on all those TV shows, it’s also not the best idea to have a loaded gun nestled into the crook of your back, even if the safety is on. When I found Darren in my office, I wasn’t scared that he took the gun. I was scared of what he’d do to me when he realized it wasn’t loaded.

  Mark and I come at each other like two wild animals, all fangs and claws and crazed sounds.

  He tries to wrap his arms around me in a bear hug, but I jam my fingers in his mouth first. He bites down hard, but not hard enough. I push back further, gripping at the soft flesh of his tongue, and pull. Mark lets go of me and I take my hand out, just as quickly, and jab it into his windpipe.

  I took self-defense with Mark’s girlfriend back in college. That’s how she and I became friends. Or what she thought was friends. That’s how I managed to get her drunk one night and so down on herself that she drove out into the farmland surrounding the edges of campus. I told her how I’d overheard Mark telling some of his friends that she was just a way station for him. That he was going to break up with her when someone better came along. I told her he’d said he didn’t think she was pretty, or smart or interesting, but that she was easy to get into bed. The real clincher though, was when I told her that he said he pictured someone else while they were having sex.

  I didn’t need to tell her that he was picturing me. She already knew. Everybody did.

  Mark wanted to be with me, but he couldn’t deal with the guilt of breaking up with Teresa, especially with her mother’s suicide a few years earlier and all of her sisters needing her. It made it that much easier to explain her self-destructive behavior though, after the accident. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and all that.

  I throw myself at Mark. He’s six inches taller than me, but nine months of bed rest have made him weak. I only need to get my hands around his neck in the right way. Don’t think about it, Brenna. Get it done.

  He squirms under the pressure of my hands, but I’m able to lean against him just so, using the pressure points I learned about in that damn class with Teresa, and hold firm. He grabs at my arms and holds tight to me for a few more seconds, but his body is too weakened from what I’ve done to him these past several months to be a real fighter.

  When Mark slumps to the ground, unconscious, I wait a few more seconds before ripping the sheets off the bed and coiling them into a tight rope that stretches across the room. I don’t have much time, but I’m making good progress when I hear voices calling from deep inside the house.

  I stop and listen for a second. I don’t hear the strong accented English, or a
nother language I don’t recognize. Instead, I hear the voices of my children—both of them—high and strained, calling out to me and to their father.

  I have to keep moving. I have to get this done.

  I grab the gun, run to the safe, and load the bullets. Just in case.

  Nothing is going the way it’s supposed to.

  Trying to count back from when I caught Darren on the laptop in the library, I figure I have maybe thirty more minutes before they arrive, guns drawn and ready for action. It was so stupid to involve Darren, when I arranged that first group of men to come and try to kidnap my husband. I thought Darren would stick to the plan, collect the money I’d agreed to pay him, and then move on.

  Instead, he decided to be the big hero, and then to stay on at Granfield. Taunting me with the information he had over me. Luckily he didn’t figure out that Mark’s illness was something I was controlling. He really thought Mark was dying, and I can only assume that’s why he didn’t turn me in. He wanted me to be there for Mark, in the end.

  It goes to show you that kindness is no kindness. All I’ve ever gotten from this world has been by fighting for it.

  Daphne and Felix’s faces swim to the surface of my thoughts, but I push them down. I fought for them too, when it comes down to it. I fought to have Mark, and then I fought to keep him.

  But sometimes other things get in the way. I made a name for myself, and I can’t let all of that slip away. I can always find a new husband. What I can’t do is build a new company, from the ground up. My reputation for failure would follow me everywhere I go. Especially as a woman in tech? No one would ever touch me again. I’d be finished.

  And I’m not willing to let that happen. There’ve been too many of us already, gasping for air in the trenches of this fucking boys’ club. I’m not going down with them. I’m a trailblazer.

  I’m making the world a better place for other women.

  As I wrap the sheet around Mark’s neck, I recall the knots I read about before wiping the servers clean. Some knots can be tied by the person making the noose. Others are tied by someone else only.