Chapter 2 - Echoes from the Grave
The drive home was a blur of sodium streetlights and suffocating silence. Mia sat in the back in her booster seat, clutching her stuffed rabbit. In the rearview mirror, her big hazel eyes—so painfully like her father’s—stared out the window.
“Baby,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking as I gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles. “What did you hear when Mr. Harold was holding you?”
Mia looked at me in the mirror. “Daddy was talking in his ear, Mommy. He sounded sick, like when he had the bad cough. He said my name. He said, ‘Mia, save me, it’s dark.’ Why is Daddy in Mr. Harold’s ear? Why can’t he come out?”
Tears burned behind my eyelids, but I bit my lip hard enough to taste copper. “Did he say anything else, sweetheart?”
“He said ‘the stone house.’ And he said ‘water.’ He was crying, Mommy. Did Daddy not go to heaven?”
A wave of nausea hit me so hard I had to pull over onto the shoulder of the empty suburban road. I buried my face in the steering wheel, my body racking with silent, violent sobs.
Mike’s death had been sudden, brutal, and bizarre. Thirteen months ago, he had been diagnosed with an aggressive, atypical neurodegenerative disorder that the doctors said mimicked late-stage spinal cancer. Within six weeks, he was hospitalized. Within eight, Harold—Mike’s business partner, our oldest family friend—had stepped in to manage everything. Harold arranged the private clinic. Harold managed the doctors. And when Mike supposedly passed away in the middle of a thunderstorm on a Tuesday night, Harold took care of the cremation before I could even process the reality of the open casket I never got to see.
*‘He wanted you to remember him as he was, Claire,’* Harold had whispered to me at the memorial service, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. *‘His body was devastated by the disease. Don’t torture yourself.’*
I had trusted him. I had handed over Mike’s private research journals, his encrypted hardware drives, his intellectual property, believing Harold was preserving my husband’s legacy for our daughter’s future.
When we finally reached our house, I locked every deadbolt, pulled every blind, and placed a heavy kitchen chair under the front doorknob.
I put Mia to bed, singing her lullabies until her breathing evened out and her small hand relaxed its grip on my sleeve. Once she was asleep, I rushed downstairs to Mike’s old study—the room I had barely entered since his funeral.
I pulled out Mike’s personal laptop from the locked bottom drawer of his desk. I booted it up and plugged in an external hard drive containing his archived schematics. I searched for the project files on the bone-conduction device.
The project was named *Project Orpheus*.
According to the design notes, the prototype did not use Bluetooth or cellular frequencies. Mike had designed it to operate exclusively on a dedicated, military-grade ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radio band to ensure absolute latency-free communication across short distances.
I scrolled down to the technical specifications. The maximum transmission range between the primary transceiver and the ear-piece was less than two miles.
Two miles.
Harold’s estate was six miles from our house. But when Harold stood by the pool tonight, the transmission was live. Which meant the source—the voice, the person speaking into the transmitter—was within two miles of Harold’s estate.
May you like
Mike wasn't dead. He had never been cremated.
***
