Chapter 6 - The Arrival
The heat on the afternoon of July 2nd was that thick, white Georgia heat that doesn't move. The air hung over Lake Oconee like a wet wool blanket, smelling of warm clay, pine resin, and outboard fuel.
Ryan’s black GMC Suburban—the oversized luxury model with twenty-two-inch rims that he insisted on driving because it looked like a government security detail—turned off the asphalt of the county road onto the private gravel lane that led through the pines to my house.
Beside him sat Lorraine, her sunglasses the size of saucers, fanning herself with a glossy brochure for a country club development in Greensboro. In the middle row sat Claire with their two children, ten-year-old Mason and eight-year-old Chloe, both of whom were buried in iPads with noise-canceling headphones over their ears. In the third row, wedged between four pieces of matching hard-shell luggage and a Yeti cooler that cost more than my first refrigerator, sat Kevin Miller, half-asleep with his mouth open.
As the Suburban cleared the final bend in the driveway, Ryan slowed down.
“What the hell is that?” he muttered.
Parked directly in the center of the circular crushed-stone drive was not my modest blue Buick LeSabre.
It was a twenty-eight-foot, dual-axle aluminum cattle trailer hooked to the back of a 2018 Ford F-350 dually, covered in dried gray mud from the south Georgia flatwoods. Next to the truck sat a military-green John Deere utility tractor with a front-end loader, its bucket resting firmly on the grass where Ryan usually parked his jet skis.
“Ryan,” Lorraine said, lowering her sunglasses with one manicured finger. “Who is that? Did Margaret hire gardeners? On a holiday weekend?”
“She didn't tell me about any work being done,” Claire said, leaning forward between the front bucket seats. Her brow was furrowed, her phone already in her hand. “I told her three times we had guests coming. She knows Kevin and Lorraine need the driveway clear to unload.”
Ryan put the truck in park, leaving the engine running and the dual air conditioners blasting. He stepped out onto the gravel, his leather loafers crunching on the stone. He was wearing salmon-colored shorts, a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled twice, and a pair of polarized sunglasses that cost four hundred dollars.
He walked toward the front porch.
The sage-green door was shut. But the porch, which Ryan had spent two years attempting to strip of its rustic character, looked different.
Thomas’s porch swing was still there. But sitting on it was not an arrangement of minimalist outdoor cushions from Pottery Barn. Sitting on it was an elderly hound dog with ears like velvet hotcakes, who lifted his head, looked at Ryan with wet, yellow eyes, gave one short, gravelly “woof,” and went back to sleep.
Next to the front door, the black digital keypad—the one Ryan had installed with such technological satisfaction three months earlier—was gone.
In its place was a rectangular scar in the cedar siding where the plastic had been pried loose. A solid, commercial-grade brass deadbolt was seated in the hole, the metal gleaming in the afternoon sun. Above the deadbolt was a fresh three-by-five-inch brass plate, screwed into the wood with four square-headed decking screws:
J. R. HARRIS, COL., USA (RET.) PRIVATE RESIDENCE TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED UNDER O.C.G.A. § 16-7-21
Ryan stood on the second step of the porch, staring at the brass plate as if it were written in ancient Sumerian.
“What the...” he reached out, touched the brass, then grabbed the handle of the green door.
It was locked solid. Not a rattle. Not a give.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, opened the NestGuard app, and tapped the screen furiously. The screen flashed a red error icon: Device Offline. Hardware disconnected by master terminal.
“Claire!” Ryan shouted, turning back toward the idling Suburban. “Claire, get out here!”
Claire stepped down into the heat, the humidity instantly curling the edges of her straight brown hair. “What is it? Did the code fail?”
“The lock is gone,” Ryan hissed, his face beginning to turn the color of his shorts. “Someone took the damn lock off the door. And there’s a sign here with some colonel’s name on it.”
Lorraine’s door opened with a heavy thud. She stepped out, her gold bangles clinking furiously as she looked around the driveway with unconcealed disgust.
May you like
“Ryan,” she called out, her voice cutting through the pine trees like a band saw. “What is that smell? Is that manure? There is farm machinery on the lawn. Kevin cannot sleep with farm machinery outside the window; you know his sinuses.”
At that moment, the screened door on the side of the house—the one that led from the mudroom to the wraparound porch—creaked open.
