Chapter 1 - Three Knocks
My dead sister screamed from inside her coffin, and the first person who tried to stop me was the man who had arranged her funeral.
“Get away from it!” the funeral director shouted.
I swung the brass arm I'd torn from the chapel chandelier again. Wood split beneath the third blow. Someone grabbed my shoulder, but I drove my elbow backward and ripped at the broken lid until a hinge tore loose.
Elise was inside.
Twenty-seven years old. Alive. A strip of gray tape covered her mouth, and plastic ties cut into her wrists. Her chest jerked as she fought for air. Purple marks circled her throat.
“Call 911!” I screamed. “She's breathing!”
Aunt Vivian dropped her prayer book. My mother made a noise I had never heard from a human being.
I tore the tape from Elise's mouth. She sucked in a breath, coughed, and clutched my sleeve.
“Who did this?” I whispered.
She couldn't force out a word. Her shaking finger rose past my shoulder and stopped on Aunt Vivian.
Vivian's purse began to ring. I snatched out a phone in a cracked blue case. Elise's phone.
On the screen, beneath a photo of a sailboat, was one word: DAD.
Our father, Daniel Hale, had died in a fire sixteen years earlier. I had watched men carry his coffin into the same cemetery where we were supposed to bury Elise today.
Vivian saw the screen in my hand. All the color left her face.
“Don't answer,” she breathed. “If he hears her breathing, he'll know he has to kill both of you.”
I answered anyway.
At first there was only static. Then a man spoke in a voice I knew better than my own.
“Nora,” he said softly. “You were always the difficult one.”
May you like
The line went dead. Behind me, the funeral director reached beneath his jacket.
And I saw the black handle of a gun.
