Chapter 4 - The House of Matches
The hallway was a tunnel of choking fumes.
The carpet squished beneath my bare feet, entirely saturated with kerosene. Daniel had not merely poured it; he had emptied gallons along the baseboards, turning our home into an elaborate wooden kiln.
I threw open the den door.
Noah was sitting up on the leather sofa, his small frame shaking violently. He was clutching a heavy brass table lamp in his thin hands, using it as a shield. His pupils were massive, dilated by the sedative in his bloodstream, his skin pale as paper.
"Mom!" he sobbed, his voice breaking. "He... he said you were already dead. He told me to close my eyes!"
"Up! Get up right now!" I commanded, dragging him from the couch.
Noah stumbled, his legs folding under him like wet cardboard. The phenobarbital was hitting his smaller body with far greater intensity than mine. I threw his left arm over my shoulder, hooking my arm securely around his waist, half-carrying, half-dragging his eighty-pound frame toward the front foyer.
Behind us, a terrifying roar shattered the darkness.
"CLARA!"
Daniel was coming. He was limping heavily, dragging his ruined knee, but he was driven by the feral desperation of a man whose life was unraveling by the second.
We reached the front door. I grabbed the brass doorknob and twisted it.
It was locked. The deadbolt required a key from the inside—a double-cylinder lock Daniel had installed six months ago under the guise of "home security against neighborhood prowlers." The keyhole was empty.
He had taken the key.
*Clank. Scrape.*
The sound of Daniel’s uneven footsteps echoed down the hallway. He was twenty feet away. In the dim hallway light, his silhouette was terrifying: hunched, blood streaming from his head, the silver Zippo open in his right hand.
A small, dancing yellow flame flickered above his knuckles.
"There's nowhere to go, Clara," Daniel said, his voice dropping into a chillingly calm register. "Look at this house. Look at what we built. It’s over. The bank is foreclosing on Monday. The investment firm found the missing six hundred thousand. I’m going to prison for twenty years unless this house burns tonight."
"You would kill your own son for a debt?!" I screamed, pushing Noah behind me against the locked oak door. "He shares your blood, Daniel! Look at him!"
Daniel glanced at Noah. For a single heartbeat, something human flickered in his bloodshot eyes—a shadow of the man who used to teach Noah how to ride a bicycle without training wheels in the church parking lot.
Then his jaw hardened, the sociopathy reclaiming him like a cold tide.
"He won't feel anything," Daniel whispered. "The smoke gets you first. It's like falling asleep. It's better this way. We start over. In Costa Rica. Sarah has the papers."
"Sarah is using you, you idiot!" I shouted, trying to buy seconds, searching the foyer for an escape. "Do you honestly think she’s splitting five million dollars with a fugitive murderer? She’s an attorney! She’ll cut a deal with the feds the second you wire the money to the offshore escrow!"
Daniel’s hand trembled slightly. The flame wavered.
"Shut up," he snarled. "Shut the fuck up!"
"Mom," Noah whispered from behind me, his voice trembling against my lower back. "The basement window. The storm cellar."
The storm cellar. The old exterior bilco doors in the basement that led directly out to the backyard patio. Daniel had never put a deadbolt on them because the exterior latch was rusted shut—or so he thought. Noah and I had oiled those hinges three weeks ago when we planted the hydrangeas.
"Daniel," I said softly, stepping forward, drawing his gaze directly to me. "Look at me. Look at what you're doing."
As he stared into my eyes, Noah slipped silently into the open doorway of the basement stairwell, four feet to our left.
"You never understood the pressure," Daniel whispered, tears suddenly mixing with the blood on his cheek. "You never knew what it was like to carry everything."
He flicked his wrist.
The burning Zippo sailed through the air.
It hit the kerosene-soaked hall runner five feet in front of me.
*WHOOSH.*
A wall of orange fire detonated with the force of a concussion grenade. The heat stripped the air from my throat instantly. The blast wave threw me backward into the stairwell opening. Flames shot up the wallpaper like burning lace, instantly devouring the photographs of our wedding, Noah’s first day of kindergarten, our trip to Maine.
The foyer was an inferno.
May you like
I grabbed the basement doorknob, pulled it shut behind me, and slammed the deadbolt just as Daniel’s flaming body slammed against the wood from the other side.
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