6. Hacking the Glass

The drive back to Verdant Hill was a blur of asphalt and adrenaline, the mountains receding in her rearview mirror like a dream she was already forgetting. Nora clutched the folder Katherine had given her, its edges digging into her palms, and tried to organize the chaos of information swirling through her mind. Eliza and Officer Mercer. A thirty-year affair. Suspicious deaths stretching back decades. A web of blackmail and poison and surveillance that had ensnared an entire neighborhood. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Matty, locked in a basement that she should have searched more carefully.

She crossed the town line at 5:42 p.m., the familiar streets of Verdant Hill rising up around her like the walls of a prison. The sun was sinking low, painting the perfect lawns and the perfect houses in shades of gold and amber. Children rode bicycles on the sidewalks. A man walked his dog. A woman tended her roses. It was a postcard of suburban tranquility, and Nora had never seen anything more terrifying in her life.

She did not go directly to her house. Instead, she parked three streets away, on a quiet cul-de-sac where the houses were shielded by tall hedges and the residents kept to themselves. She pulled out her phone and called Patricia Holloway.

The phone rang four times before Patricia answered, her voice tight and breathless. "Nora? Where are you? Everyone is talking. The police were at your house. They said you fled. They said—"

"I did not flee. I went to find Katherine Reyes. I found her." Nora paused, listening to the silence on the other end of the line. "Patricia, I need your help. I need to know if you still have the gift Eliza gave you. Something in a jar. Something she told you was homemade."

The silence stretched. When Patricia spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper. "How do you know about that?"

"Because she gave me the same thing. Oleander honey. It is poison, Patricia. It has been poison all along."

"I never ate it," Patricia said, the words tumbling out in a rush. "I was going to. I was going to serve it at a dinner party, but something stopped me. The smell. It smelled wrong. I put it in the back of my pantry and I forgot about it. That was two years ago."

Nora felt a surge of hope so sharp it was almost painful. "I need that jar. Tonight. Can you get it for me?"

"I do not know. Eliza has been calling me. She knows something is happening. She is watching everyone more closely than ever." Patricia's voice cracked. "I am afraid, Nora. I am afraid of what she will do if she finds out I helped you."

"I am afraid too," Nora said. "I am afraid for my son. I am afraid for myself. But I am more afraid of what happens if we do nothing. If we let her keep doing this, year after year, decade after decade. How many more families will she destroy? How many more people will get sick and die while we stand by and pretend everything is normal?"

Another silence. Then: "Meet me at the community garden. Midnight. I will bring the jar."

The line went dead.

Nora sat in her car for a long moment, staring at the darkening sky. Midnight was six hours away. Six hours of waiting, of hiding, of imagining all the things that might be happening to Matty while she sat helpless in a borrowed car on a borrowed street. She thought about calling Katherine, but the signal in the mountains was unreliable, and besides, there was nothing Katherine could do from three hours away. This part, she had to do alone.

She spent the hours in a diner on the edge of town, a place called "Rosie's" that catered to truckers and night-shift workers and people who had no interest in the pristine perfection of neighborhoods like Lilac Lane. She ordered coffee and a slice of pie that she did not touch, and she read through Katherine's files for the third time, memorizing every detail, every name, every date.

The files painted a picture that was both meticulous and terrifying. Eliza Alistair had been born Eliza Crane, the daughter of a wealthy family that had made its fortune in real estate development. She had married Thomas Alistair at twenty-three, a union that had given her control of the Alistair family trust and a seat on the board of the Verdant Hill Development Corporation. Thomas had died of a heart attack six years later, at the age of thirty-four. The death had been ruled natural causes. No autopsy had been performed.

Three years after Thomas's death, Eliza's sister-in-law, Margaret Alistair, had challenged the terms of the will. She had argued that Eliza had exerted undue influence over Thomas in his final months, that the transfer of assets should be nullified. The legal battle had dragged on for eighteen months. Then Margaret had fallen ill at a family gathering, complaining of nausea and chest pains. She had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The coroner had listed the cause as cardiac arrest, secondary to an undiagnosed heart condition.

Nora flipped through the pages, her coffee growing cold beside her. There were more. So many more. A business partner who had threatened to expose accounting irregularities. A neighbor who had filed a noise complaint about construction at the Alistair property. A landscaper who had quit without notice and then, six months later, had been found dead in his apartment, his heart having simply stopped. Each death had been ruled natural. Each victim had been cremated. Each case had been closed without investigation.

But the files also contained something else: a list of survivors. People who had received Eliza's gifts and, for one reason or another, had not consumed them. People who had crossed Eliza and lived to tell about it, though most had fled Verdant Hill and never looked back. Katherine had tracked down seven of them. Their testimonies, recorded in transcripts and audio files, told a consistent story. The gift. The suspicion. The decision to throw the food away or hide it or have it tested. And in two cases, the test results that proved the presence of cardiac glycosides.

The evidence was overwhelming. But it was not enough. The deaths were too old, the evidence too circumstantial. What Nora needed was a fresh sample, a jar of oleander honey that could be tested in a modern lab, that could be traced back to Eliza's garden, that could prove beyond any doubt that the woman at 39 Lilac Lane was a serial poisoner.

Patricia's jar was the key.

At 11:30 p.m., Nora left the diner and drove to the community garden. It was a small plot of land at the edge of the neighborhood, a patch of green that had been set aside for residents who wanted to grow vegetables and flowers. During the day, it was a cheerful place, filled with the chatter of gardeners and the buzz of bees. At night, it was something else entirely. The shadows were deeper here, the silence more profound, and the rows of plants seemed to lean toward her as she walked, their leaves brushing against her legs like grasping fingers.

Patricia was already there, standing beneath a trellis overgrown with climbing roses. She was wearing a dark coat, the hood pulled up to hide her face, and she clutched a paper bag to her chest like a shield.

"You came," she whispered, her voice trembling with relief.

"Did you bring it?"

Patricia handed her the bag. Nora opened it carefully, revealing a mason jar filled with the same deep purple honey that she remembered from her own kitchen. The label was identical: "Oleander Honey," written in Eliza's elegant script.

"Thank you," Nora said. "I know how much of a risk this is for you."

"You do not know the half of it." Patricia glanced over her shoulder, her eyes scanning the darkness. "Eliza called a meeting tonight. An emergency session of the committee. She said there was a threat to the neighborhood. She said someone was spreading lies, trying to destroy the community from within. She looked right at me when she said it."

"What did you do?"

"I sat there and I nodded and I pretended I did not know what she was talking about. But she knows, Nora. I am sure of it. She knows I met with you. She knows I gave you the files." Patricia's voice broke. "I am not brave like you. I am not strong. I have spent my whole life doing what I was told, following the rules, keeping my head down. And now I am going to lose everything."

Nora reached out and took Patricia's hand. "You are braver than you think. You gave me the files. You brought me the jar. You are the reason we have a chance to stop her. When this is over, when Eliza is exposed and the neighborhood is free, it will be because of you."

Patricia shook her head, tears streaming down her face. "You do not understand. She is not going to let this happen. She has been doing this for too long. She has too many allies, too many secrets. Even if you prove what she did, even if you take her down, she will find a way to destroy me first. She always does."

"Not this time," Nora said. "This time, we have something she does not. We have the truth. And we have each other."

She did not add what she was thinking: that she had less than thirty hours remaining on Eliza's ultimatum, and that if she did not find Matty soon, none of it would matter.

Nora took the jar and drove back to her car, her mind already planning the next steps. She would drive to Ashton first thing in the morning, deliver the sample to Katherine's contact at the toxicology lab, and wait for the results. If the lab could confirm the presence of oleander toxins, she would have the evidence she needed to go to the authorities. Not the local police, who were compromised, but the state police, the FBI, anyone who was beyond the reach of Eliza's network.

But first, she needed to check the basement.

She parked on a side street and approached 42 Lilac Lane on foot, moving through the shadows of the oak tree and the hedges that lined the property. The house was dark, the windows empty, the porch light off. It looked abandoned, a hollow shell of a home, and for a moment Nora felt a pang of something that might have been grief. She had come here hoping for a fresh start, a new life, a place where she and Matty could heal from the wounds of the past. Instead, she had found a nightmare, a house full of secrets and a street full of watchers.

She let herself in through the back door, moving silently through the kitchen and down the hallway. The grandfather clock was still ticking, its pendulum swinging with mechanical precision. The time read 12:17 a.m. Nora did not know if that was accurate. She no longer trusted anything in this house.

The basement door was at the end of the hallway, a narrow slab of wood that opened onto a steep staircase. She pulled the chain for the overhead light, and a single bare bulb flickered to life, casting harsh shadows against the concrete walls. The stairs creaked under her weight as she descended, each step a small act of courage.

The basement was exactly as she remembered it: damp, musty, cluttered with the accumulated debris of Aunt Celia's long seclusion. Boxes of old clothes. Stacks of newspapers. A furnace that hummed with a low, steady vibration. And in the far corner, half-hidden behind a tower of cardboard boxes, a door.

Nora pushed the boxes aside, her hands trembling. The door was small, barely four feet high, made of unfinished wood that had warped with age. There was no handle, only a rusted latch. She slid it open and pulled.

The door swung outward, revealing a crawlspace that extended into darkness. The smell that wafted out was different from the rest of the basement: fresher, colder, as if it connected to somewhere outside. Somewhere hidden.

She pulled out her phone and switched on the flashlight, directing the beam into the darkness. The crawlspace was narrow, its walls lined with insulation and old wiring, but it extended farther than she would have expected. Ten feet. Fifteen. Twenty. And at the far end, there was something on the ground. A shape. A bundle of blankets.

A figure.

"Matty!"

She crawled forward, ignoring the splinters that bit into her palms, the cobwebs that brushed against her face. The figure did not move. It was wrapped in a heavy blanket, its face turned away from her, its body utterly still.

She reached it. She touched its shoulder. And then she recoiled, her hand flying to her mouth, because the figure was not Matty.

It was a woman. Elderly. Her skin grey and cold, her eyes closed, her hands folded across her chest like a figure on a tomb. She was wearing a floral dress that Nora recognized, a dress she had seen in photographs upstairs, a dress that belonged to a woman who was supposed to have died of a heart attack eighteen months ago.

Aunt Celia.

Nora scrambled backward, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The body was not decomposing. It was preserved, almost mummified, as if someone had taken great care to keep it intact. And clutched in its hands, pressed against its chest, was a mason jar identical to the one in Nora's bag. "Oleander Honey," the label read. "Batch 42. Special Reserve."

She did not remember crawling out of the crawlspace. She did not remember climbing the stairs or bursting through the back door or collapsing onto the grass of the backyard. What she remembered, later, was the cold night air on her face and the stars wheeling overhead and the absolute, suffocating certainty that she was not alone.

A light flickered on in the second floor of 39 Lilac Lane.

Nora looked up, and she saw a figure standing at the window, silhouetted against the yellow glow of the study. The figure did not move. It did not wave. It simply stood there, watching, as if it had been watching all along, as if it had been waiting for her to find exactly what she had found.

Nora pulled herself to her feet and ran. She ran through the backyard, through the hedge that separated the properties, through the dark streets of Verdant Hill, her bag clutched against her chest and the jar of poisoned honey heavy in her hand. She did not stop until she reached her car, and then she drove, without destination, without plan, her mind a hurricane of horror and revelation.

Aunt Celia had not died of a heart attack. She had been murdered. And her body had been hidden in the crawlspace, preserved like a trophy, waiting for someone to find it. Eliza had been inside the house. Eliza had access to the basement. Eliza had been watching Nora from the very beginning, and she had known, all along, exactly what was hidden beneath the floorboards.

The clock on the dashboard read 1:43 a.m. Nora had roughly twenty-nine hours remaining.

She drove to Ashton, to the toxicology lab, to the one person who might be able to help her make sense of the nightmare her life had become. And behind her, in the darkness of Lilac Lane, the light in the second-floor study remained on, a beacon of malevolence, a signal that the game was not over.

It was only just beginning.