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If you wish to play, follow the link to your first clue. Doing so will trigger release of the funds into your account.
He can’t be foolish enough to think clicking on the link will provide access to my IP address, unless he believes I’m a total idiot. I click on the link as instructed, which opens to a blank page. An image begins to load, slow and tediously, as if the file is too large. It’s a picture of my mother, who must’ve been eighteen at the time, given the youth of her eyes. A cloth is draped over her shoulder, where she sits on a crushed red velvet couch that I remember from childhood, and my tiny feet are sticking out of the right side of the cloth as she breastfeeds me. It’s a photo I recognize from the thick album of baby pictures she kept in the closet. As the picture loads from the top down, more details come through in remarkable clarity. The wallpaper behind her, covered in cowboys and stagecoaches, that I used to stare at during long hours of punishment.
Frowning, I stare back at the screen, trying to tease the ways a baby picture might be a clue.
And? I type back to him.
Eyes collect the truth that the mind chooses not to see.
I click on the photograph again, realizing there’s something in it I’m just not picking up. Everything is as I remember in the photograph. The walls. The coffee table that always held magazines and the TV Guide. The couch. My mother. Me. That’s it. Zooming in on each detail fails to reveal anything out of the ordinary.
I refuse to let him believe he’s stumped me on the first clue, so, for now, I click out of the image and resign myself to come back to it again later.
Tell me what happens in three weeks.
I win the game.
How?
You see? You remember how to play this one. You die a relatively benign death. Afterward, I watch you sink to the bottom of the river.
There was a time threats like that would scare the absolute shit out of me. Back when he was so much bigger than me and my world was so much smaller. I’ve seen too much death since, to be rattled by his words. Gruesome demises that make me wonder just how different the two of us really are.
Funny, I say in response. It was you I watched sink the last time we played.
His lack of reply tells me I’ve pissed him off. Last thing an egotistical psychopath like him wants to hear about is how the weak and gangly kid he inherited grew up to be a worthy opponent. The thought puts a smile on my face as I swipe out of my messages, giving one last mental tease of the image he sent to me.
Carl works in puzzles starting from the middle. He doesn’t frame the image in a way that’s helpful, or obvious, and I can only imagine the answer will hit me at some random moment, so no point dwelling on one piece when I have an entire jigsaw to figure out in the next few weeks.
It’s a shame police aren’t smart enough to track him down, but I suppose that’s what makes him such a formidable rival, what sends a jolt of excitement through my veins. He doesn’t make himself an easy kill.
I gather the file into a pile and dump Nola’s medical records into my briefcase, then lock it up and slide it beneath the coffee table.
Inside the fridge are three days of meals that I ordered from a chef in New York who prepares clean, organic foods. It’s enough until I find a suitable replacement here, or do the cooking myself. I eat a goat cheese and prosciutto sandwich with the basil pesto included in a small side cup, before I head out to the one place I’ve avoided since the night I escaped seventeen years ago.
The house where I grew up.
* * *
The dilapidated fascia board dangles from the massive roof, slamming against the worn-down, chipped brick of the home, whose interior walls kept me imprisoned most of my teenage years. The Jansen estate was something of a landmark, years before my grandfather took over, having inherited it from his father, who made a fortune in the meatpacking business. The once-stately tudor mansion might’ve belonged to me after my grandfather died, if he hadn’t been such a selfish, greedy prick. Instead, millions of dollars went to the state, and the property went to shit, it seems.
The surrounding neighborhood is quiet and dark, not as active these days, judging by the unkempt yards and rotted exteriors that haven’t been properly maintained for the kind of money these houses boast.
Beyond the busted iron gate, I flick my cigarette away and make my way up the cracked driveway, over the weeds sticking up from the slivers in the concrete. High gables slice up toward the night sky, through the looming canopy of a nearby beech tree, like two silent opponents fallen into an eternal rest.
Place is still creepy as shit after all these years.
The kids had a rhyme they used to sing about it after my mom died here. Something about the monsters inside pulling you in, never to be seen again.
I’m pretty sure they had no clue my mom died, as my grandfather only reported her as missing to police, and so began the rumor that she was placed in a mental institution, to coincide with their cute little songs about the house.
The times I went to school, I got teased relentlessly about how she lost it after I was born. “One look at your ugly face, and she went bonkers,” they said. If only it had been that simple. I’d have preferred that end, in lieu of her suffering.
If only they knew the truth was far worse than what they imagined.
Lies are so much easier, though. Not as cold and bitter. Terrifying. Lies don’t slither down your throat, into your belly, eating you from the inside out, the way the truth does. Instead, they remain at the tip of the tongue, loaded and ready spew at the first police officer who asks what really happened that night.
I didn’t tell them what I witnessed, for fear my grandfather would see to it that I became the next victim buried in the woods behind the property.
