Chapter 1: The Awakening
The scent of Casablanca lilies will forever be the scent of a lie. It was a
suffocating, aggressively sweet perfume that hung in the air of my son’s
expansive, aggressively modern Chicago home, desperately trying to mask the
metallic, hollow scent of death. But death was not what I was smelling. I was
smelling premeditation.
My name is Margaret Vance. I am seventy-two years old, a widow for nearly a
decade, and until this freezing evening in late November, I believed the
greatest tragedy of my life was the sudden, inexplicable passing of my
six-year-old granddaughter, Jessi.
The living room had been cleared of its sleek, Italian leather furniture to make
room for the mahogany casket. It sat in the center of the room like a heavy,
dark accusation. A velvet rope kept the mourners—mostly Arthur’s tech-industry
colleagues and Patricia’s country club acquaintances—at a polite distance. They
murmured in hushed tones, sipping expensive Scotch, offering condolences that
felt rehearsed, polished, and utterly devoid of genuine grief.
I stood alone near the head of the casket. I wore a heavy black wool shawl over
my mourning dress, my hands trembling so violently I had to clasp them tightly
together at my waist.
Arthur, my only child, stood across the room. He was playing the part of the
devastated father with the practiced ease of a stage actor. His eyes were
red—artificially so, I now realize—and he kept his arm wrapped protectively
around Patricia. Patricia, my daughter-in-law, wore a black designer dress that
cost more than my first car, a pair of dark sunglasses shielding her eyes from
the subdued, ambient lighting. She dabbed at dry cheeks with a monogrammed
handkerchief. She had never liked Jessi. I knew it. Arthur knew it. The child
had been an accident, an interruption to Patricia’s curated, child-free,
high-society existence.
The medical examiner had called it a sudden cardiac anomaly. A congenital defect
that had gone unnoticed until it stopped her tiny heart in her sleep three days
ago. The autopsy was rushed, the death certificate signed by a private physician
Patricia had insisted upon hiring rather than the family pediatrician. I had
questioned it. I had begged for a second opinion. But Arthur had yelled at me,
calling me a hysterical old woman who couldn’t accept the will of God.
I looked down into the casket. Jessi looked like a porcelain doll. Her blonde
hair, usually a tangle of wild curls from playing in my garden, had been
flattened and sprayed into submission. Her pale skin was powdered, her lips
painted a soft, unnatural pink. She was wearing a white silk dress, the kind of
stiff, uncomfortable garment she would have cried over having to wear in life.
The house was too quiet. Beneath the hum of the central heating and the muted
whispers of the guests, a terrible, vibrating tension hummed in my jaw. A
grandmother’s instinct is not something that dulls with age; if anything,
stripped of the distractions of youth, it becomes a razor edge. Something was
wrong. The air around the casket didn’t feel static. It felt charged.
I stepped closer, brushing past the velvet rope. A few guests looked over, but
no one dared stop the grieving grandmother from saying a final goodbye. I
reached into the casket, intending to smooth a stray lock of hair from her
forehead.
The moment the pad of my index finger grazed her skin, a shockwave of adrenaline
blasted through my nervous system, instantly clearing the fog of grief.
She was warm.
Not the lingering warmth of a freshly deceased body, nor the ambient temperature
of the room. She was radiating heat. A deep, unnatural, chemical fever was
burning beneath her powdered skin.
My breath caught in my throat. I froze, my hand hovering over her face. I looked
across the room. Arthur and Patricia were engaged in a solemn conversation with
a city alderman, their backs turned to me. No one was looking.
I leaned closer, pretending to kiss Jessi’s cheek. I pressed my ear millimeters
from her parted lips.
A breath. So shallow it wouldn’t have fluttered a feather, but I felt it. The
faintest, most agonizingly slow wisp of warm air brushed against my earlobe.
My heart slammed against my ribs like a trapped bird. She is alive. Dear God in
heaven, she is alive.
Panic, wild and blinding, urged me to scream, to flip the casket, to demand a
doctor. But a colder, darker realization clamped a hand over my mouth.
I looked at her posture. Her arms were crossed over her chest in a traditional
pose, but they looked unnaturally rigid. I slipped my hand beneath the white
silk of her dress, moving down her side. My fingers brushed against something
hard, cold, and metallic.
Straps.
Hidden beneath the lining of the casket, tightly secured around her tiny wrists
and waist, were heavy leather restraints locked with a small metal clasp.
Someone hadn’t just prepared her for burial. Someone had secured her so she
couldn’t thrash when she woke up underground.
The horror of it was so absolute, so profoundly evil, that for a fraction of a
second, my brain refused to process it. My son. My own flesh and blood.
Daddy said if I woke up, I would ruin everything.
The voice was a ghost, a vibration against my collarbone. I looked down. Jessi’s
eyes were still closed, but her lips had barely moved.
As the small metal lock clicked open beneath my trembling fingers, I slid my
hands under her back and pulled Jessi’s trembling body against my chest. Her
skin was dangerously hot, radiating that chemical, unnatural fever. She clung to
my neck with whatever microscopic strength she had left, her breathing shallow
and ragged.
“I was good, Grandma,” she whimpered, her voice muffled by my thick wool shawl,
hidden from the room. “Mommy gave me the bitter juice so I could sleep for the
angels. But it burns. It burns inside.”
Every memory of the past three months—Patricia’s sudden insistence on isolating
the child, the withdrawal from school, the fake private doctors who only visited
when I wasn’t allowed over, and Arthur’s averted, guilty eyes—suddenly
crystallized into a horrifying mosaic of premeditated murder. They were going to
bury her alive to avoid a trace of poison in her blood.
I held her tight against me, turning my back to the room, pretending to be
overcome with sobbing. I pulled my smartphone from my purse, my thumb shaking
violently as I dialed 9-1-1. I hid the screen beneath my shawl, holding the
phone near my collar.
“911, what is your emergency?” the dispatcher’s voice crackled faintly.
“I am at 4400 North Lake Shore Drive,” I whispered, barely moving my lips, the
tears now flowing not from grief, but from a terror so profound it felt like I
was drowning. “There is an attempted murder in progress. My granddaughter is
alive. They are trying to bury her. Please, send the police, send an ambulance.
They are in the room with me.”
I waited for the reassuring response, the promise of sirens, the command to stay
calm.
Instead, there was silence.
“Hello?” I whispered frantically. “Hello, do you hear me?”
Nothing. Not even static.
Then, the silence of the house was shattered.
From across the room, I heard Arthur’s voice cut through the polite murmurs.
“Mom? What are you doing? Let go of her. You can’t hold the body like that.”
I didn’t turn around. I gripped Jessi tighter, wrapping the heavy shawl
completely around her small frame, hiding her. I began to back away from the
casket, moving toward the hallway that led to the rear of the house.
“Mom!” Arthur’s voice escalated, shedding the velvet tone of a mourner and
taking on the sharp, frantic edge of a panicked criminal.
As I whispered my location to the dead phone one last time, a heavy thud echoed
from the floorboards. Arthur’s footsteps, frantic and heavy, began sprinting
across the hardwood, heading straight for me. I turned and ran, the weight of
the child in my arms threatening to throw me off balance. I reached the hallway,
slamming the heavy oak door behind me, knowing full well that the dispatcher on
the phone hadn’t said a word because in this district, with this much money,
Arthur likely owned the dispatch system too.
