The suitcase zipper sounded like a scream in the quiet bedroom.
Maya winced as she pulled it shut, the movement sending a fresh spike of pain through her bruised ribs. Her left arm was in a sling, a souvenir from the ditch she had driven into less than twenty-four hours ago. Every breath tasted like airbag dust and copper.
“We have enough socks,” Dan said from the doorway. He was holding a stack of Leo’s t-shirts, his face pale and drawn. He looked like a man who had aged ten years in ten days. “How long are we booking the suite for, May?”
“Indefinitely,” Maya said, not looking at him. She hoisted the bag off the bed with her good arm. “Until I say it’s safe.”
“Safe,” Dan repeated, the word hollow. He looked around their bedroom—the room where they had slept for two years, the room where he had lied about his past, the room that was now just a box with microphones in the walls. “You really think a Marriott is going to stop him?”
“The Marriott has key cards, security cameras in the halls, and twenty-four-hour desk staff,” Maya said, limping past him. “And it doesn’t have a history of murder. It’s safer than here.”
They moved through the house like thieves, stripping it of essentials. Maya grabbed the hard drive from the safe. She grabbed the passports. She grabbed the box of photos from the top shelf of the closet. It wasn’t just an evacuation; it felt like an admission of defeat. The house, with its high ceilings and chef’s kitchen, felt hostile now. The shadows seemed to stretch toward them, trying to snag their ankles.
Downstairs, Leo was sitting by the front door, clutching his triceratops and wearing his backpack. He didn’t ask where they were going. He had learned, in the way children of trauma learn, that questions only made the adults tense.
“Let’s go,” Maya said.
She walked out the front door and didn’t look back. She didn’t look at the sunroom glass, cracked from the vibration of the storm. She didn’t look at the birdhouse in the woods. She just got into the rental car—a generic sedan that smelled of industrial cleaner—and drove her family out of the Gables.
As they passed the gatehouse, the guard waved. Maya didn’t wave back. She was looking at the rearview mirror, watching the white fences recede until they were swallowed by the tree line.
They were refugees in a luxury SUV, fleeing a war zone that appeared, to the naked eye, like paradise.
The “War Room” was located in unit 204 of the Parkway Executive Suites, sandwiched between a divorce attorney and a failing chiropractor.
It was a ten-by-twelve box with commercial grade carpet that smelled of glue, fluorescent lights that hummed at a frequency designed to induce migraines, and zero windows. It cost four hundred dollars a week, paid in cash by Elena to avoid a paper trail.
It was perfect.
Maya sat at the folding table in the center of the room, adjusting her sling. The pain meds the hospital had given her made the edges of her vision fuzzy, but her mind was sharp, honed by rage.
The door opened, and the rest of the Club filed in.
Elena looked exhausted, her usually immaculate hair pulled back in a severe bun. Sarah wore sunglasses, though there was no sun in the room, hiding eyes that were likely swollen from crying. Chloe carried a cardboard box filled with tech gear, her face set in a grim line.
“It smells like despair in here,” Chloe noted, setting the box down on the table.
“It smells like a clean frequency,” Maya corrected. “I swept it myself before you got here. No bugs. No cameras. Just us and the hum of the mini-fridge.”
Sarah sat down gingerly on a metal folding chair. “I feel like I’m in a holding cell.”
“We are,” Maya said. “We’re holding ourselves until the threat is neutralized.”
She stood up, wincing, and walked to the whiteboard she had propped against the wall. She had taped a large, printed map of Bittersweet Court to the surface. Red string connected the houses to the woods, to the library, to the police station.
“We’ve been playing defense,” Maya said, her voice gaining strength. “We’ve been reacting. Running to the library. Running to the vet. Running to the hospital. That ends today. We are off the board now. He doesn’t know where we are. He can’t script us if he can’t see us.”
“He knows we’re gone,” Elena pointed out. “The houses are dark. The cars are gone. He knows we ran.”
“Good,” Maya said. “Let him think we’re scared. Let him think he won. Arrogance makes people sloppy.”
Chloe began unpacking her equipment—laptops, hard drives, a tangle of cables. “I set up a remote server. If he tries to ping our phones, he’ll get a bounce location in Des Moines. We’re ghosts.”
“But we’re also blind,” Sarah said, her voice trembling. “We’re sitting in an office park five miles away. If he goes back to my house… if he hurts Barnaby…”
“Barnaby is at the kennel,” Maya reminded her. “And your house is locked. But you’re right. We lost our eyes on the ground.”
She looked at the map. From this distance, the cul-de-sac looked small. Manageable. It was just a circle of asphalt and wood. It wasn’t a monster; it was geometry.
“Does anyone feel… different?” Maya asked.
“You mean aside from the terror?” Chloe asked.
“I mean the pressure,” Maya said. “When I was in the house… even before the bugs… I felt watched. I felt the weight of the neighborhood. The rules. The expectations. The Gazette. Being here, in this ugly room… I can think.”
Elena nodded slowly. “It’s the fishbowl effect. You don’t realize how distorted your vision is until you step out of the water.”
“Exactly,” Maya said. She picked up a marker. “We’ve been looking at the suspects as neighbors. As people we know. We need to look at them as data points.”
She drew a circle around the cul-de-sac.
“The Podcast isn’t just about murder,” Maya said. “It’s about control. The killer controls the narrative. He controls the timing. He controls the fear. Why?”
“To punish us,” Sarah suggested. “For the sins of 1994.”
“That’s the text,” Maya said. “That’s the script. But what’s the subtext? Look at the targets. Me—the journalist. Chloe—the financial fraud. Sarah—the witness. Elena—the supplier.”
“He’s dismantling the support structures,” Elena analyzed. “Media, money, social standing, medicine. He’s isolating the community.”
“Or,” Maya said, drawing a line from the cul-de-sac to the wetlands, “he’s clearing the board.”
“What do you mean?” Chloe asked.
“Think about it,” Maya said. “If we all leave… if we all run away like I just did… what happens to Bittersweet Court?”
“It becomes a ghost town,” Sarah said.
“It becomes vacant,” Maya corrected. “Property values tank. The reputation is destroyed. Nobody will buy those houses for years.”
“So he’s a nihilist?” Chloe asked. “He wants to destroy the neighborhood value?”
“Or he wants to buy it,” Maya said.
The room went silent. The hum of the refrigerator seemed to grow louder.
“Buy it?” Sarah asked. “Who would want to buy a murder scene?”
“Someone who knows what’s underneath it,” Maya said.
She tapped the map, right over the green expanse of the wetlands.
“The Sinks,” she said. “A limestone quarry that flooded. But before that? It was land. Land that the developers couldn’t build on because of federal protection. But protections change. Zoning changes.”
“You think this is a real estate scam?” Elena asked, skeptical. “That feels… mundane. For a guy hanging dresses and poisoning dogs.”
“The motives for murder are usually mundane,” Maya said. “Love. Revenge. Money. We’ve been focused on the first two. But Episode Five was called ‘The Ledger.’ He told us to look at the money.”
She looked at Chloe. “You still have access to the MLS database? The real backend?”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “Why?”
“Check the ownership history of the wetlands,” Maya said. “Not the houses. The land behind them. The buffer zone.”
Chloe typed furiously. Her screen illuminated her face in blue light.
“It’s owned by the Gables Conservancy,” Chloe said. “A non-profit attached to the HOA.”
“And who runs the Conservancy?” Maya asked.
Chloe clicked. “The Board. President, Vice President, Treasurer.”
“Elias Thorne,” Maya said. “And Rick Vance’s father before him. And Marcus Thorne before him.”
“So the HOA owns the swamp,” Elena said. “So what?”
“Look at the map,” Maya said. She drew a line through the wetlands. “If you drain the Sinks… if you reclaim that land… you double the size of the development. You add fifty homes. That’s fifty million dollars in real estate.”
“But you can’t drain it,” Sarah said. “It’s protected.”
“Unless it’s condemned,” Maya said. “Unless it’s deemed a public health hazard. Or a crime scene that requires extensive excavation.”
She looked at the women.
“What if the bodies aren’t the point?” Maya asked. “What if they’re just the excuse to dig?”
The theory hung in the air, heavy and cold. It shifted the genre of their story from a slasher flick to a corporate thriller, but the danger felt just as sharp.
“We need to know what’s in that water,” Maya said.
“We can’t go back there,” Sarah said, panic rising in her voice. “You said we’re safe here.”
“We are,” Maya said. “But the answers aren’t.”
She walked to her bag and pulled out a new burner phone she had bought at the 7-Eleven next door.
“We need eyes,” she said. “We need to know what he’s doing now that the stage is empty.”
“How?” Chloe asked. “We pulled the bugs. We covered the cameras.”
“The empty house,” Maya said. “Number 5. The Cursed House. It’s for sale.”
“So?”
“So, it has virtual tours,” Maya said. “Smart home features. The realtor left the system active for showings. I saw the listing.”
She handed the phone to Chloe.
“Hack the house next door,” Maya ordered. “Hack the cameras inside Number 5. It looks out onto my driveway. It looks out onto the street. If anyone comes to my house… if anyone comes to any of our houses… the Cursed House will see them.”
Chloe took the phone. A slow smile spread across her face. “I can do that. I can get into the Nest system.”
“Do it,” Maya said. “We might be refugees, ladies. But we just set up a sniper tower.”
As Chloe typed, Maya looked at the blank beige wall of the office. She missed her sunroom. She missed the light. But here, in the dark, she could finally see the shape of the monster. It wasn’t a ghost. It was a developer. And developers could be bled.