“Where is the baby, Adam?” Eleanor’s voice was a low growl that silenced the whispers of the crowd.
“The baby died, Mom! You heard the doctor!” Adam shouted, though his eyes were darting wildly. “She was delusional. The trauma of the birth… she went crazy. She wrote that in a fever dream before she passed.”
“In a fever dream?” Eleanor stepped toward him, holding the paper up for the pallbearers to see. “She wrote this after you told the world she was dead. Look at her fingers, Adam! She wrote this inside this box! She woke up in the dark, in the cold, and she used her last breath not to pray for herself, but to tell me where you hid her child!”
One of the pallbearers, a burly man named Miller who had known Adam since high school, stepped forward and placed a heavy hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Stay put, Adam. Nobody’s going anywhere until the Sheriff gets here.”
“Get your hands off me!” Adam snarled, shoving Miller.
In the distraction, Eleanor felt a strange, cold sensation wash over her. She turned back to the coffin. The smell of formaldehyde was thick, but beneath it, there was something else. A faint, rhythmic sound.
Thump.
It wasn’t a knock this time. It was a heartbeat.
Eleanor lunged back to the casket, pushing the pastor aside. She put her ear to Chloe’s chest. The skin was cold—ice cold—but deep within that hollow chamber, there was a flicker. A stubborn, dying spark of life that refused to be extinguished by her son’s cruelty.
“She’s warm!” Eleanor lied. She knew Chloe was fading, but she needed the men to move. “She’s still warm! Get an ambulance! Now!”
The cemetery turned into a blur of motion. Miller and the other men hoisted Chloe’s limp body from the casket. As they lifted her, the reason for the “supernatural” weight became clear. Beneath the false bottom of the expensive white coffin lay three heavy lead ingots—ballast used to make the coffin feel occupied by a heavy, “swollen” corpse, or perhaps to ensure it sank deep if it had been destined for the river instead of the dirt.
But more importantly, tucked into the side of the lining, Eleanor found Chloe’s wedding ring, which Adam had claimed was lost. Wrapped around the ring was a small, high-tech GPS tracker—one Adam had used to monitor Chloe’s every move while she was alive. She must have swiped it from his bag and hidden it on her person as her only insurance policy.
Adam saw the tracker in Eleanor’s hand and bolted.
He ran toward his black SUV, tires screaming as he tore through the grass of the cemetery, narrowly missing a headstone.
“Call the police!” the pastor yelled, fumbling for his phone.
But Eleanor didn’t wait. She knew where the “Creek House” was. It was an old, derelict hunting cabin her husband had left to Adam in his will—a place miles away from the prying eyes of Savannah’s high society.
