Prologue
Something coiled around Maggie’s ankle and pulled her toward the door.
She fell forward and banged her head against the wooden floor, grabbing for the leg of the small breakfast table. She grasped it with bloody fingers, ripped and torn from trying to dig into a splintering section of the wall. She managed to gain solid purchase for just a moment and held herself still against the pull of her captor.
Her mind reeled.
How had this happened? How had it come to this?
In her stressed final moments, her mind replayed the scene again…
* * *
Minutes ago, in the post-twilight gloom of dusk, Maggie Walker returned from a spur-of-the-moment trip to the CVS for a few things—just a quick trip out to the highway and up to the corner for milk and batteries before turning around and coming right back out to Lake Lavon.
The road to their family’s vacation home was long and wound through a few miles of woods to the lakeside. When she pulled up, shutting off the headlights, she noticed something was wrong.
The door stood open. More than that, a dark shape lay on the wooden front step of the porch. The shape was familiar, a shape she had seen hundreds of times through the glow of a room illuminated by her daughter’s Cinderella night-light at home. So yes, she knew the shape right away, and while her heart clenched painfully at the sight, her conscious mind would not admit it was reality.
She climbed those front stairs to kneel at her daughter’s side. Her sweet little Caroline… six years old, dead. Her child’s lifeless brown eyes looked black under starry skies and the light of the moon. Worse, her throat had been chafed and punctured—one single hole in her neck the size of a half dollar showed ragged meat, dribbles of blood.
Maggie’s breath caught in her throat. Her whole body tensed. A sob would not emerge from her lips until she hurried up those front stairs and saw the image of her husband, wrapped protectively around the body of their four-year-old son.
She sobbed and tears filled her eyes. The sound of anguish resonated from her as she rushed to them and saw that they too had been restrained and strangled, apparently by ropes. Her son’s neck was punctured as her daughter’s had been. But her husband Ben’s neck was only strangled—the bloody hole in him was in his inner thigh, huge and ragged. Her husband’s and son’s faces seemed unreal to her in that moment as she searched their eyes for life.
They were dead. Strange, surreal facsimiles of the people she had loved.
She didn’t have time to mourn them.
She dug her fingernails into the wood of the rustic log cabin wall in a desperate attempt to moor herself to reality.
That was when the wet rope wrapped around her ankle and yanked her off her feet.
Maggie fought, but to no avail. The same thick rope wrapped around her neck and squeezed tight, cutting off the oxygen to her brain.
She saw a blanket of darkness behind her eyelids, squeezed tightly closed. White stars speckled her blackened vision as she felt herself losing consciousness.
She was distantly aware of the groping between her legs, and her last moment’s thought was of the hole that had been punctured in her husband’s thigh.
