I Died In His Sick Game novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Staged

By morning the video had four million views.

SHARK BOY AND THE DROWNING WIFE, one post said.

She looks pretty healthy for someone who starved, said another.

I read them on Nan's phone on the back porch until Nan took the phone away and put it in the deep freeze.

"There," she said. "Now it's chilled out."

The first van came at two o'clock.

By four there were five of them in the gravel lot, and reporters on the dock.

A man in a blue jacket leaned over the deck rail, shouting at the kitchen window.

"Abby! Abby, did you fake your death?"

"Abby, is Eli Sayward your lover?"

Tilly was coloring at the kitchen table. She put her crayon down and looked at the window.

I pulled her into the pantry with me and shut the door.

She was shaking.

"Are they the boat men?"

"No, baby. They're just loud."

Outside, there was a sound like a fire truck.

I opened the pantry door a crack.

Nan was standing on the deck in her rubber boots with the big pressure hose from the crab boat.

It was the one she used to blast barnacles off the hull.

She hit the man in the blue jacket square in the chest.

He went down on the boards.

"This is a working dock!" Nan bellowed. "You want a story? Woman hoses trespassers. Film it!"

She swung the hose across the dock.

Two cameramen ran. One of them slipped and sat down hard on a cooler.

Tilly started to giggle.

Then she laughed out loud, a real laugh, a big one.

I hadn't heard that since before the island.

I put my face in her hair and laughed with her until I cried.

The vans were gone by six.

That night Tilly had her first nightmare.

She slept in my bed with one hand on my arm.

At two in the morning she sat straight up and screamed.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Died In His Sick Game from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.