Chapter 5
The words hung in the humid night air like a physical blow, choking the breath right out of Clara’s lungs. She stared past the stranger in the trench coat, her eyes dropping down to the weathered concrete patio stones beneath Elena’s feet. The patio had been poured late in the autumn of three years ago—just weeks after Leo was reported missing by the local authorities. At the time, Elena had claimed it was a weekend DIY project to replace the crumbling old brickwork.
“No,” Clara whispered, shaking her head in vehement denial as tears blurred her vision. “No, you’re lying. That’s just patio concrete. It’s just stone.”
Elena bowed her head, her shoulders shaking with silent, wracking sobs that tore at her chest. She didn’t look up to defend herself, and in that crushing silence, her absolute stillness served as a damning confession.
“You poured it over him,” Clara said, her voice rising in a pitch of pure, unadulterated horror. She stepped away from Elena as if her sister had suddenly transformed into a monster. “You actually poured concrete over our own brother’s grave right outside the kitchen door.”
“What choice did I have?” Elena cried out, finally breaking her silence with a desperate, frantic wail. She fell to her knees on the grass, clutching the wet earth with her bare hands. “They said if I didn’t help them secure the property, they would burn the house down with us inside it! I had to bury him where nobody would ever think to look—right here at home, where I could keep watch over him every single day.”
The man in the trench coat adjusted his fedora, watching the family drama unfold with the detached boredom of a theater critic evaluating a tragedy. He checked an expensive-looking gold wristwatch strapped to his thick wrist.
“Touching family reunion, truly,” the man said dryly, stepping around the air conditioning unit. “But sentimentality doesn’t pay off offshore accounts. Ms. Vance—the older one, who actually knows how business works—has exactly two hours to transfer the remaining forty thousand dollars into the shell corporation account. Otherwise, I make an anonymous call to the state environmental agency, and they bring heavy excavation equipment to inspect that patio slab by sunrise.”
Clara’s mind raced through the impossible options. Forty thousand dollars was an astronomical sum, far beyond anything she could scrape together from her modest savings account as a graphic designer in the city. But the alternative was even more unthinkable: the police arriving, discovering a body buried beneath the concrete, and dragging both her and Elena away in handcuffs for conspiracy and accessory after the fact.
“We don’t have forty thousand dollars,” Clara said, her voice trembling with cold fury as she glared at the stranger. “You drained every account we had down to the last cent.”
The man smirked, sliding his hands deep into the pockets of his trench coat. “Then I suggest you start digging through your sister’s jewelry box, or better yet, start looking at what else is hidden inside those black plastic trash bags on the lawn.”
May you like
With that ominous warning, the man turned on his heel, his heavy boots crunching across the grass as he slipped back into the dense shadows of the back fence, vanishing into the night as quickly as he had appeared.
Silence reclaimed the backyard, broken only by the mechanical hum of the air conditioner. Clara slowly turned her gaze from the empty fence line down to the black plastic bag resting near her feet, wondering what other nightmares her sister had dragged out of the dark.
