The Dead Man

Chapter Two

January 2009

Maggie Brennan had been waiting to die for fifty years so when the lights went out while she was working late at night and the bell hanging on a hook above the front door jingled as it opened and slammed shut, loosing icy winter wind into the farmhouse, and heavy, steady footsteps trudged up the stairs toward her bedroom, she didn't call 911, cry out, or grab a letter opener to defend herself.

She'd dreamed of this moment often. The image of the killer was as hazy as it had been when she was ten years old, painting her cheeks with her parents' blood before she hurled herself off the balcony outside her bedroom, the killer never caught, never forgotten.

Her work as a neuroscientist researching the toll of trauma on the brain was a constant reminder of that night. Her nightmares affirmed her unspeakable certainty that she would leave this life the same way as had her parents.

She rose from her chair, her voice quiet and calm when her killer appeared in the doorway. "What took you so long?" she asked.

French doors opened behind her onto the balcony, the frozen earth two stories beneath sloping away from the house, rough and rocky. She swung the doors wide, stepping onto the balcony, her feet bare, frigid air rippling through her thin nightgown, pickling her skin. Branches of an oak tree just beyond her reach swayed in the starless night, the eaves above her whining, complaining of the cold.

Her back was to the bedroom. She felt him approach, felt the wooden planks of the balcony sag, then felt a hand slide down the length of her neck, settling into the base of her spine, the push firm as she went over the rail and the unforgiving ground rushed to meet her.

She awoke, as she always did, the instant before impact, her mouth coated with bile. Why, she wondered, was it so easy to kill and so hard to die.