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“I was just so happy to be working that I didn’t really stop to think how weird it all was,” my mother says at one point. “But looking back on it now, it was like something out ofThe Twilight Zone.”
After mentioning buying my father a watch for his birthday and leaving it in her desk, necessitating a nighttime trip to the office, my mother gets to the heart of the story. “The incident,” she calls it, using air quotes to express its importance.
Without a key to the front door of the Hawthorne Institute, she went to the rear of the mansion, hoping to find an unlocked back door. Instead, she found the area behind the mansion aglow with firelight.
“Torches,” my mother says. “They were placed in a large circle on the grass behind the mansion.”
She tells us that inside the circle were Ezra Hawthorne and several other men, all dressed in black robes. They, too, were arranged in a circle, surrounding a small fire and chanting in a language she couldn’t place.
“Latin?” I say.
My mother shakes her head. “No. Something different. It sounded, I don’t know, almost primal. But that wasn’t the worst part. Ezra Hawthorne held what appeared to be a copper plate. There was something on it.”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t tell you. I’ll get in trouble.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone. I swear. Now, please, what was on the plate?”
My mother pauses a bit longer before forcing out the words. “A heart.”
I stare at my parents, suddenly woozy, their faces on my phone’s screen blurring in and out of focus. While I don’t know what I was expecting, it certainly wasn’tthat.
“I couldn’t tell from what,” my mother continues. “Human or animal, I don’t know. It was slick with blood, like it had just been removed. Mr. Hawthorne picked it up with his bare hands and lifted it over the fire.”
“Then what did he do?”
My mother tells me she doesn’t know, because she was already trying to run away, only to come face-to-face with her boss. Although he wasn’t taking part in the ritual, it was clear he knew it was going on, especially once he took my mother inside to his office and fired her.
“He made me sign something forbidding me from talking about it with anyone,” she says. “An NDA. Legally binding. I was told that if word got out that I talked, Mr. Hawthorne would sue me. I know, I know. Saying you’re going to sue someone is usually an empty threat. But I knew this was serious, especially after what I saw. A man like Ezra Hawthorne would go to extreme lengths to make sure that stayed a secret.”
“Extreme,” I say, the word a bombshell in my thoughts, obliterating them until a new one emerges.
All this time, I’d harbored a vague theory that someone associated with the Hawthorne Institute abducted and killed Billy because of something he’d witnessed after I and the others abandoned him at the mausoleum.
But what if that wasn’t the case?
What if it had nothing to do with what Billy potentially saw and everything to do with what my mother actually did see? Yes, the Hawthorne Institute made her sign an NDA and threatened to sue if she talked. But what if they thought that wasn’t enough? How far would they go to ensure her silence?
That brings forth another, far more frightening theory.
Maybe Billy wasn’t the intended target.
Maybe I was.
The idea sends me slumping against the sofa, my mind reeling. I think about Billy and me tucked into our individual sleeping bags and how indistinguishable we must have looked in the darkness. I picture a person in a black suit—maybe Ezra Hawthorne, maybe one of his followers—still clutching the knife used to slash the tent, blindly grabbing Billy while thinking it was me. I imagine him carrying Billy through the woods and not realizing his mistake until they reached a car parked on the access road halfway between here and the institute.
I force myself not to think about what likely happened after that.
“Mom, other than the NDA and mentioning a lawsuit, were you threatened in any way?”
“No,” my mother says. “Frankly, that was enough. I could tell that my boss meant every word.”
I furrow my brow. “You keep mentioning this guy. What did he do there?”
“He was Ezra Hawthorne’s right-hand man. The institute was named for Mr. Hawthorne, but everyone knew that my boss was the one who really ran the place.”
Which makes her boss the person most invested in making sure everything that went on there remained a secret. If the institute did have something to do with Billy’s murder, he would know about it. In fact, it’s likely he’s the one who orchestrated it.