THE GREEN SAUCE: PART 2 – News

The wood of the bathroom door groaned under the impact of Daniel’s palm.

Inside the suffocating, dimly lit space, the air felt thick, smelling faintly of lavender soap and the metallic, sour tang of the poison coursing through my veins. Every breath felt like inhaling ground glass. My stomach twisted in a violent spasm, but I clamped my hand over my mouth, swallowing down the bile. I couldn’t make a sound. Not now.

“Rachel!” Daniel’s voice came again, dropping an octave, losing every shred of the charming, upper-middle-class husband persona he had maintained for eight years. “I know you’re holding the door. Don’t make this harder than it already is. You’re only delaying the inevitable.”

Beside me, Noah let out a tiny, pathetic whimper. His small, seven-year-old body was burning up, a fever spiking rapidly from whatever toxin Daniel had laced into our dinner. His eyes, usually so bright and full of mischief, were glassy and unfocused, rolling toward the back of his head.

Stay with me, baby, please stay with me, I screamed in my mind, pulling him closer until his damp forehead rested against my collarbone.

On the floor beside my knee, the cell phone emitted a faint, almost imperceptible hiss. The 911 operator was still there, a disembodied lifeline to a world that felt miles away. I brought the receiver to my ear with a trembling, numb hand.

“Ma’am?” the operator’s voice was a microscopic thread of sound. “Officers are two minutes away. Sirens are off to avoid alerting the suspects. Hold on. Just hold on.”

Two minutes. It might as well have been two lifetimes.

“Daniel, please,” the woman’s voice whispered from the hallway. I could hear her pacing, the sharp click-clack of her stilettos stuttering on the hardwood. “The car is packed. We have the passports. If they… if they took the chicken, they’re already dead or dying. We don’t need to do this. We need to go before the neighbors notice anything!”

“Shut up, Vanessa!” Daniel hissed, his tone sharp enough to cut. “If she’s in there, she has her phone. If she called anyone, we’re ruined before we even reach the state line. I need to make sure. I need to see them.”

The utter coldness in his voice shattered the last remaining fragment of my heart. This was the man who had kissed me goodbye before work every morning. The man who had coached Noah’s little league team. He wasn’t trying to hide his crime out of panic; he wanted to confirm his success. To him, we were just loose ends on a balance sheet that needed to be zeroed out.

Thud.

He threw his shoulder against the door. The old brass lock jingled, the wood splintering slightly around the frame.

Noah jolted, a sudden, violent convulsion racking his small frame. He gagged. I knew the signs—the poison was rejecting his stomach, but if he vomited loudly, Daniel would know exactly where we were positioned behind the door. Terrified, I forced my own hand over his mouth, weeping silently as my son choked back the fluid, his tears scalding hot against my palms.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I mouthed into his hair, my heart shattering into a million pieces.

Thud!

Another heavy strike. The top hinge of the bathroom door gave way with a sickening crack. A sliver of light from the hallway cut through the darkness of the bathroom, illuminating the haze of dust motes dancing in the air. Through the crack, I could see a sliver of Daniel’s face. His eyes were wide, manic, completely devoid of the man I loved. He looked like a predator staring into a trap.

“I see you, Rachel,” he whispered, his voice dangerously close to the splintered gap. “I see the shadow of your feet. Open the door, honey. Let me help you. It’ll be quicker that way.”

“Daniel, look!” Vanessa suddenly shrieked from the living room. “On the counter! Her purse—her keys are still here, but her phone isn’t!”

“Damn it!” Daniel roared.

He didn’t throw his shoulder against the door this time. Instead, he kicked it. The heavy, solid wood shuddered, and the bottom latch tore completely out of the drywall. The door swung inward by a few inches, blocked only by my body weight and the heavy wicker laundry hamper I had dragged in front of it.

The gap was now wide enough for him to see us clearly.

Daniel’s eyes locked onto mine. A sickening, cruel smile spread across his lips. “There you are. Look at you. Look at what you’ve done to our son, Rachel. If you had just signed the divorce papers and let me have the trust fund, we wouldn’t be here.”

“You… you monster,” I choked out, my voice raspy, my throat burning as if filled with acid. It was the first time I had spoken, and it took every ounce of my remaining strength.

“Call me what you want,” Daniel said smoothly, reaching his arm through the cracked door, his fingers straining to reach the inner handle to push the obstruction away. “But in an hour, the police will find a tragic murder-suicide. A depressed mother, unable to cope with an impending divorce, poisons her own son and takes her own life. And me? The grieving husband, comforted by his loyal assistant, miles away on a business trip.”

“The police… already know,” I wheezed, lifting the phone just high enough for him to see the glowing screen.

Daniel’s smile vanished. His face contorted into a mask of pure, unadulterated rage.

“You bitch!” he screamed.

He threw his entire weight against the door. The wicker hamper crushed into splinters. The force slammed the door into my shoulder, sending a bolt of agonizing pain down my spine. I was thrown backward onto the cold tile, losing my grip on Noah.

The phone flew from my hand, skittering across the floor and sliding directly under the clawfoot bathtub.

“Ma’am! Ma’am! We hear him! Units are turning onto your street now!” the operator’s voice echoed faintly from beneath the tub, but it sounded like it was underwater. My vision was tunneling. Black spots flared at the edges of my sight. The poison was shutting my body down. My muscles felt like lead; I couldn’t lift my arms.

Daniel stepped into the bathroom.

He looked immaculate compared to the horror on the floor. His crisp blue button-down shirt was barely wrinkled. He looked down at me and Noah with an expression of profound disgust, as if we were a pair of spilled drinks on an expensive rug.

Behind him, Vanessa hovered in the doorway, her hands pressed over her mouth, her eyes darting frantically around the room. “Daniel, we have to go! If she called them, they’re coming! Let’s just take the money and run!”

“Not until I get that phone,” Daniel growled. “If there’s a recording, the insurance won’t pay out. The whole point of this was the payout, Vanessa! I’m not leaving empty-handed.”

He knelt down, his expensive leather shoes stepping right into a puddle of Noah’s spilled bathwater. He reached out to grab my hair, pulling my head back brutally. I gasped, a cry of pain escaping my lips.

“Where is it?” he demanded, shaking my head. “Where did it roll?”

I looked past him, my fading vision focusing on my son. Noah wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed, his face dangerously pale, a thin line of white foam forming at the corner of his lips.

No. No, please. Take me, just let him live.

A surge of primal, maternal adrenaline flared through my dying nervous system. It overrode the paralysis. It overrode the pain.

With a guttural scream, I drove my fingernails into Daniel’s face, dragging them down his cheek. I felt his skin tear, warm blood instantly coating my fingers.

Daniel shrieked, letting go of my hair as he clutched his bleeding face. “You miserable whore!”

He backhanded me. The force of the blow cracked my head against the porcelain base of the sink. Sparks exploded in my eyes, and I collapsed onto my side, completely paralyzed this time. I could feel warm blood trickling from my temple, mingling with the cold water on the floor.

“Daniel! Red lights! I see red lights through the trees!” Vanessa screamed from the front of the house, her voice rising to a panicked shriek. “They’re here! The cops are here!”

“Get the car started!” Daniel yelled back, wiping the blood from his cheek and looking down at his hand in disbelief. He looked back at me, his eyes burning with a demonic hatred. “You think you won, Rachel? Look at your boy. He’s gone. And you’re about to join him.”

He didn’t look for the phone anymore. Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, silver object.

A lighter.

My breath hitched.

“If the poison doesn’t finish the job, the smoke will,” Daniel whispered. “A tragic house fire. Destroys all the evidence. It’s perfect.”

He walked out of the bathroom, leaving the door wide open. From my position on the floor, unable to move a single muscle, I watched through the hallway as he grabbed a bottle of high-proof bourbon from the living room bar. He splashed it aggressively across the hallway carpet, the curtains, the wooden stairs.

“Daniel, hurry!” Vanessa’s voice wailed from the front door.

He flicked the lighter. The small flame danced in the darkness of our home, casting long, monstrous shadows against the wall.

“Goodbye, Rachel,” he said loudly.

He dropped the lighter.

Whoomp.

The alcohol-soaked carpet ignited instantly. A wall of bright, aggressive orange fire erupted in the hallway, cutting off the bathroom from the rest of the house. The heat hit my face like a physical blow, instantly drying the sweat on my skin. Thick, black, acrid smoke began to billow toward the ceiling, rolling along the molding and pouring into the bathroom like a dark tidal wave.

Outside, the faint, distant wail of sirens finally broke through the night air. They were close. Maybe thirty seconds away.

But thirty seconds was too long.

The smoke dropped lower, filling the room. I began to cough, a violent, hacking sound that tore at my lungs, but my limbs still refused to obey me. The poison had completely disconnected my brain from my body. I could only watch as the smoke crawled across the floor, creeping toward Noah’s motionless form.

Get up, I screamed at myself. GET UP!

I managed to twitch my fingers. That was it. Just a twitch.

Through the roaring crackle of the flames in the hallway, I heard the front door slam shut. Daniel and Vanessa were gone. They were escaping into the night, leaving us to burn alive in the dark.

Then, a sound broke through the roaring fire.

It wasn’t the sirens. It wasn’t the crackle of burning wood.

It was a heavy, metallic crash from the back of the house. The sound of the kitchen window shattering.

My heart hammered against my ribs. Had the police broken in through the back? But the sirens were still down the street. It couldn’t be them.

Through the thick barrier of fire and smoke in the hallway, I saw a silhouette appear at the end of the corridor.

The flames illuminated the figure clearly. It wasn’t a police officer in tactical gear. It wasn’t a firefighter.

It was a tall man, dressed entirely in black, wearing a heavy leather jacket. He didn’t seem bothered by the fire. He walked through the smoke with a slow, deliberate stride, a wet cloth held over his mouth. In his right hand, he held something heavy and metallic. A crowbar.

He stopped at the edge of the fire, looking directly through the flames into the bathroom, straight at me.

I couldn’t see his face through the smoke, but as he stepped closer to the edge of the blaze, the firelight caught his eyes. They were cold, calculating, and completely familiar.

It was Arthur Carter. Daniel’s estranged older brother, a man who had been presumed dead in a boating accident three years ago. The man whose massive inheritance Daniel had stolen to fund his lifestyle.

Arthur looked at me, then looked down at the fire separating us. He raised the crowbar, but he didn’t move to help. Instead, he reached into his jacket, pulled out a small glass vial filled with a clear liquid, and tossed it through the flames.