Chapter 3 - The Digital Ghost
I stared down at the items inside the rusted metal box as if looking at an artifact from an alien civilization.
My name—Ethan—was printed in crisp, modern computer font on the paper. In a world where my grief had been defined by handwritten sympathy cards, legal documents, and three-year-old photographs, seeing a freshly printed label felt jarring, almost invasive.
"Did someone give this to you?" I asked sharply, turning my gaze toward Emma and Ella.
The twins didn't flinch. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their small hands clasped together in front of their mud-stained dresses.
"The man," Emma said simply.
"What man?" I pressed, standing up quickly, my protective instincts flaring beneath the confusion. "Who gave you this box? Did he bring you to the house?"
"He brought us in the big black car," Ella chimed in, her voice completely devoid of childish inflection, sounding terrifyingly rehearsed. "He said if we gave the bread to the nice man in the SUV and showed him the box, Mama would come back."
A cold dread pooled in the pit of my stomach.
This wasn't a supernatural haunting. This wasn't a miraculous echo of Olivia reaching out from the grave.
It was a setup.
Someone had used two frightened, exploited children as delivery pawns, dragging them into the mountains to lure me out here. But why? Who knew I was coming to the mountain house this weekend? My therapist knew. That was it. I hadn't told anyone else at my investment firm; I had taken the weekend off abruptly, claiming I needed time away to clear my head.
Before I could process the chilling realization, the dark screen of the smartphone sitting inside the lunchbox suddenly lit up.
Bzzzt.
The vibration was sharp against the metal casing.
An incoming video call.
I hesitated for a fraction of a second, my pulse hammering in my ears, before reaching down and swiping the screen to accept. The front camera flashed on, displaying a live feed of the caller, but the screen on the other end was pitch black.
"Ethan," a distorted, electronically altered voice echoed from the phone's speaker. It sounded metallic, raspy, and thoroughly unnatural. "I was wondering how long it would take you to find my little welcoming committee."
"Who is this?" I demanded, leaning over the bench, my voice echoing off the mossy rocks of the hollow. "What kind of sick game are you playing with these kids?"
The distorted voice let out a slow, mocking chuckle.
"Game? No, Ethan. This isn't a game. This is a reckoning. You spent the last three years mourning a saint, building your multi-million-dollar empire on the sympathy of a tragic widower, while completely ignoring what your precious Olivia was really doing out here in the woods."
My chest tightened. "Shut up. You don't know anything about Olivia."
"Don't I?" The voice shifted, the electronic modulation dropping lower, sounding heavier and more dangerous. "Open the sketchbooks inside that box, Ethan. Look at the last entry she made before her 'sudden' aneurysm three years ago. Then tell me if you really knew your wife at all."
The call abruptly disconnected.
Click.
The screen went black, reflecting my own pale, horrified face staring back at me.
For a long moment, the only sound in the hollow was the bubbling of the natural spring and the wind rustling through the high oak branches. The twins watched me, their expressions blank, untouched by the terrifying gravity of what had just happened.
My hands shook as I reached into the lunchbox, pushed aside the bright yellow scarf, and lifted the top sketchbook. The pages were thick, yellowed slightly by age and dampness, filled with Olivia's familiar charcoal sketches of wildflowers, deer, and mountain ridges.
I flipped frantically toward the back.
Page after page of beautiful landscape art. Then, near the final pages, the artistic style changed drastically.
The sketches weren't of nature anymore.
They were architectural blueprints. Hand-drawn layouts of a high-security underground server room, complete with security camera blind spots, encrypted network bypass codes, and a logo stamped in the corner that made my breath lock in my lungs.
It was the exact logo of my own investment firm—Brooks Capital Global.
May you like
And scrawled across the margin in Olivia’s handwriting was a single, terrifying sentence:
“If anything happens to me, Ethan didn't build the firm. He stole the foundation.”
