2On Christmas morning, my 9-year-old daughter opened a present from her grandfather, my father-in-law. Just seconds later, she let out a terrifying scream, clutching her face and crying that it was burning.

My hand moved to the receiver before my brain could process the terror screaming through my nervous system. I lifted the plastic handset to my ear, pressing it so tightly against my skin the plastic groaned.

“Where are you?” I whispered.

There was a short pause on the line, followed by the faint, rhythmic sound of an idling two-stroke engine in the background—the low, wet rumble of a snowmobile idling in deep powder.

“You always were quick to ask questions you don't have the stomach to hear answered, Nora,” Harold said. His tone was smooth, devoid of anger, entirely conversational. It was the same tone he used when he was explaining how to properly cure timber or dress a white-tailed deer. “How is the little girl?”

“Don't you dare speak her name!” I hissed, my knuckles turning white around the handset. “Don't you ever say her name again! You burned her, Harold! You poured lye into a jar and gave it to a nine-year-old child!”

“I gave the jar to *you*,” Harold replied, his voice dropping slightly, the chill in it cutting straight through the telephone line. “I left it beneath the tree with your name on the card. Your husband, in his infinite stupidity, thought it would be sweet to change the tag while you were in the laundry room so she’d have one more box to unwrap. Brian always was sentimental. It was his greatest flaw. His mother had the same weakness.”

The air left my chest.

*Brian changed the tag.*

The memory of Christmas morning flashed through my mind like lightning. When Brian came out of the back room before sunrise, he had been laughing, carrying a roll of Scotch tape and a red pen. He had said, *‘Dad bought something fancy for you, but Tessa’s been eyeing that silver box all week. Let her have the fun of opening it first, okay? You can take it back after.’*

Brian hadn't known what was inside. He had just wanted to avoid an argument between his father and his wife. He had tried to grease the wheels of our family’s misery with a small, harmless Christmas gesture, and in doing so, he had handed his daughter the poison meant for his wife.

“You’re a monster,” I choked out, tears of pure horror spilling over my lashes. “The police have your cabin, Harold. They found your workshop. They have your notes. They know about Evelyn.”

Harold let out a dry, rattling chuckle that ended in a cough. “Evelyn was thirty years ago, Nora. The only people who remember Evelyn are an old woman in a nursing home and a file folder in a Spokane basement that’s already been eaten by silverfish. Ray Miller made sure of that before he took his pension.”

“Ray Miller is dead,” I spat, bluffing wildly, hoping to shake even a fraction of the granite composure from his voice.

“Ray might be,” Harold said softly, “but Art isn't. And Art’s boys know who pays the taxes on their timberland. The state troopers won't find anything on Blackwood Ridge that Art doesn't want them to find. But you... you have a more immediate problem, Nora.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. “What are you talking about?”

“You think two sheriff’s deputies outside Room 314 are going to keep that hospital safe?” Harold murmured. “Mercy Memorial has five separate service entrances, Nora. The laundry chutes run straight down to the loading dock on Fourth Street. A man in gray coveralls with a clipboard can walk anywhere he pleases in that building. I know that because I delivered medical oxygen to Mercy for six years after the foundry closed down.”

My heart stopped beating.

“You’re not in Idaho,” I gasped.

“I didn't say where I was,” Harold replied, his voice dropping into that terrifying, paternal calm that had terrorized his family for half a century. “Brian failed. He failed as a son, and he failed as a man who could keep his household in order. When a dog won't stop barking at the master, Nora, you don't shoot the dog. You remove the person feeding it from the table.”

“If you touch her—”

“I don't want Tessa,” Harold interrupted, the words cold and flat as a tombstone. “Tessa is a Cole. She carries my bloodline. Once the rot is cut out of the branch, the tree grows straight again. You’re the rot, Nora. You’ve been the rot since the day Brian brought you home from that state college with your high-and-mighty ideas about how a family should run.”

“Harold—”

“I’m coming for my granddaughter,” he whispered. “And if you’re standing between me and that bed when the power goes out, Nora, what happened to her cheek this morning is going to look like a minor sunburn compared to what I do to you.”

The line went dead.

A sharp, mechanical dial tone buzzed in my ear.

I slammed the receiver back onto the hook, grabbed my car keys from the island, and ran toward the front door. I didn't care about the cold. I didn't care about the lockbox. I didn't care about the snow drifting across the driveway.

Harold wasn't running toward the Canadian border.