Chapter 4 - The Abandoned Orchard
The Aston Martin tore off the highway and headed north out of the city, eating up the miles of Interstate 87 as it raced toward the Hudson River valley. The text message with the photograph of the blood-stained coat had contained metadata coordinates pointing to a single location: the old family orchard on Nora’s ancestral riverfront land in upstate New York.
It took Ethan less than ninety minutes to cover the distance that usually took two hours.
When he turned off the paved state road onto the weathered gravel lane leading down to the river, the landscape looked desolate under the gray March sky. Thirty-eight acres of overgrown apple trees, rusted wire fences, and boarded-up textile warehouses stretched out toward the freezing gray current of the Hudson.
In the center of the clearing stood the weathered white farmhouse where Nora’s grandmother had lived for fifty years.
Ethan slammed the car in park, killed the engine, and burst out into the biting wind.
“Nora!” he shouted, his voice echoing across the empty orchard, swallowed up by the skeletal branches of the apple trees.
There was no answer. Only the distant sound of the wind rustling through dry brush and the creak of an old wooden shutter hanging by a single hinge on the side of the farmhouse.
He ran toward the front porch, his boots crunching over gravel and frozen grass. The front door was unlocked, pushed slightly ajar as if someone had entered in a desperate hurry.
He pushed it open.
“Nora!”
The interior of the house smelled of old dust, cedarwood, and faint, sweet lavender—her scent. The living room was untouched, but as he moved down the narrow hallway toward the back kitchen, he saw something that made his blood run cold.
On the hardwood floor near the pantry door lay a trail of dark, dried droplets.
Blood.
Not a smear like the one on the coat in the parking garage photo, but distinct, separate drops leading down a narrow flight of wooden stairs that descended into the old root cellar beneath the house.
Ethan didn't hesitate. He grabbed an iron fireplace poker leaning against the brick hearth, gripped it with both hands, and descended the dark cellar stairs one by one.
The air below was damp and freezing. The beam of his phone flashlight cut through the gloom, illuminating rows of empty canning jars, wooden storage crates, and dusty stone walls.
At the far corner of the cellar, huddled behind a stack of weathered wooden boxes, was a figure wrapped in a gray wool blanket.
“Nora?” Ethan breathed, his voice breaking as he dropped the iron poker and rushed across the concrete floor.
The figure stirred. A pale, exhausted face looked up into the light of his phone.
It was Nora.
May you like
Her dark hair was damp and tangled, her face pale as parchment, and her swollen belly outlined sharply beneath the blanket. But it wasn't her exhausted expression that made Ethan freeze in horror—it was the dark crimson stain spreading across the front of her clothes.
“Ethan,” she whispered, her voice barely a breath. “You... you shouldn't have come here.”
