CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The house was quiet for the first time in what felt like weeks, and Marissa Skelling intended to enjoy every second of it.
Derek had taken the kids—both of them, which was the critical part—to the seven o’clock showing of whatever animated movie had been advertised on every cereal box in the grocery store for the past month.
He’d suggested it after dinner, reading the tension in her shoulders the way he’d learned to over twelve years of marriage, the way a person learned to read weather by watching the sky.
Go take a bath, he’d said. Put on that music you like.
I’ve got the monsters. He meant the children.
He always called them the monsters when he was being affectionate, which was most of the time.
Marissa had kissed him and the monsters and watched the minivan pull out of the driveway with the particular relief of a woman who loved her family deeply and also loved them leaving.
The furlough was supposed to have been a reprieve, but three weeks at home with a seven-year-old and a five-year-old, while the news ran constant coverage of the Armory murders, had turned it into a siege.
The kids didn’t understand why Mommy couldn’t go to work.
Marissa didn’t fully understand it herself—she was a tile specialist, for God’s sake, brought onto the renovation to restore the Armory’s original floor work.
She laid tile. She didn’t know anything about bayonets or maces or whoever was turning a construction site into a crime scene.
But three of her coworkers were dead, and the building was sealed, and the police had told everyone to stay available and stay careful, which were two instructions that occupied very different spaces in Marissa’s mind. Available meant waiting. Careful meant afraid. She was both.
She padded upstairs in her socks and started the bath, turning the hot tap to full and adding the lavender salt she'd been hoarding since Christmas.
The bathroom filled with steam. She set her phone on the vanity, queued up the Norah Jones playlist that Derek teased her about, and refused to apologize for, and was reaching for the towel rack when the doorbell rang.
She paused. Considered ignoring it. The bath was running, the music was starting, and the list of people she wanted to talk to right now was exactly zero names long.
But the doorbell rang again—not insistent, not aggressive, just the polite, slightly tentative press of someone who wasn’t sure they should be bothering her.
She turned off the tap, went downstairs, and opened the front door.
Raymond Palmer stood on her porch with his hands in the pockets of a dark wool overcoat, his shoulders slightly hunched against the March cold.
He looked the way he always looked—mild, unassuming, the kind of face you’d forget five minutes after a conversation ended.
Wire-rimmed glasses, thinning brown hair combed neatly to one side, the soft features of a man who spent more time in archives than outdoors.
He was smiling, but the smile had an uncertain quality, as though he’d rehearsed it on the drive over and wasn’t sure it had landed.
"Marissa. I’m so sorry to bother you at home." His voice was quiet, almost apologetic—the voice of a man who navigated the world by taking up as little space as possible. "I tried calling, but I think your phone might be off."
It wasn’t off. It was upstairs, playing Norah Jones to an empty bathroom. "Raymond. Hi. Is everything okay?"
"Yes, yes. I just—I wanted to ask you about something.
The ancestry test you mentioned at work, a couple weeks ago?
The one with the Middle Eastern results?
" He adjusted his glasses with a gesture she recognized, the habitual nervous fidget of a man who touched his frames the way other people cracked their knuckles.
"I've been doing some research for the exhibit narratives, and your results—the Syrian heritage—actually connect to a really fascinating thread in the region’s immigration history.
I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about it. "
It was such a Raymond thing to say—earnest, academic, slightly tone-deaf to the fact that showing up unannounced on a Saturday evening to discuss genealogy was not standard social behavior.
But that was Raymond. He lived inside the history the way other people lived inside their own heads, and the boundaries between professional curiosity and personal intrusion were lines he genuinely didn’t seem to see.
"Sure," Marissa said, and stepped aside to let him in. "I was about to take a bath, but I’ve got a few minutes."
He walked past her into the living room, and she closed the door against the cold and followed him.
The house was warm, lamplight pooling on the hardwood floors, the faint sound of Norah Jones drifting down from the second floor like something heard through water.
Palmer stood in the center of the room and looked around with the quiet, cataloging attention he brought to everything—she’d seen him do the same thing at the Armory, standing in the middle of a gutted hall and reading the space the way other people read a page.
"Can I get you anything? Coffee, or—"
"No, no. I won’t keep you long." He turned to face her and his hand moved inside his coat—not to his glasses this time, not the familiar fidget, but deeper, into the lining, with a deliberateness that was different from anything she’d seen from him before.
The smile was still on his face, but it had changed.
The uncertainty was gone. What remained was something patient and focused and absolutely still.
He withdrew his hand from the coat and Marissa saw the knife.
It was old. That registered first—the way the blade caught the lamplight with a dull, tarnished gleam that spoke of decades, not days.
A heavy thing with a brass handle and a triangular blade and a set of spiked knuckle guards that gave it the look of something designed not just to cut but to break.
It was an old trench knife. The kind of weapon men had carried into the mud of no-man’s-land a century ago, built for the close, desperate work of fighting in a space too narrow for rifles.
Palmer held it at his side with the ease of a man holding a pen.
"Raymond—" Her voice came out thin, a wire pulled taut. The word was all she managed before he moved.
He was faster than a soft-spoken man in his fifties had any right to be.
The knife came up and forward in a short, economical arc aimed at her midsection, and the only thing that saved her was the step she’d already been taking backward—away from the wrongness she’d seen in his expression before her conscious mind had named it.
The blade passed through the space where her stomach had been a half-second earlier, close enough that she felt the displaced air against her shirt.
Marissa didn’t scream. She turned and ran.
The stairs were six steps away and she took them at a sprint, her socked feet slipping on the hardwood at the landing as she grabbed the banister and hauled herself upward.
She could hear him behind her—not running, not crashing, but following with the measured tread of someone who wasn’t in a hurry.
Who had calculated the angles and found them favorable.
The front door was behind him. Her phone was upstairs. The children were gone.
She reached the second floor and threw herself into the bathroom, slamming the door and turning the lock in the same motion.
The lock was a standard interior mechanism—a push-button in the center of the knob, the kind designed to keep five-year-olds from walking in on their parents, not to stop a man with a knife.
Her hands were shaking so badly that the button nearly slipped under her thumb before it caught.
Steam. The bathroom was still full of steam from the bath she’d been drawing, the mirror fogged, the lavender-scented air thick and warm and completely at odds with the cold terror that had taken up residence in her chest. The tub was half full of water.
Norah Jones was still playing from her phone, which was—
On the vanity. Right here. She snatched it up and then went still, because the phone’s screen showed exactly what she’d left it showing: the music app, mid-playlist. Not the phone screen. The phone was up here. She’d carried it up when she started the bath. She had it.
No. That was the Bluetooth speaker on the vanity, connected to the phone.
The phone itself was downstairs. On the kitchen counter, where she’d left it when Derek called to say they were leaving the house.
She’d set it down and walked upstairs and queued the music through the speaker and never gone back for it.
She looked at the window. It was small—a single casement above the toilet, maybe eighteen inches wide and fourteen tall, the kind of window designed to let in light and air and absolutely nothing the size of a grown woman’s shoulders. She could get her head through. Maybe an arm. That was it.
Footsteps on the stairs. Slow. Measured.
The footsteps reached the landing and stopped.
Silence. Then his voice, quiet and conversational, as though they were still standing in her living room discussing immigration patterns.
"Marissa. This doesn’t have to be difficult."
She pressed her back against the far wall and stared at the door and the flimsy lock and the steam that curled between them, and she did the only thing she could think to do. She reached for the small frosted window, wrenched it open against its ancient hinges, and screamed.