The bouquet of white lilies sat on my porch like an accusation. I stood in the February drizzle, keys still in my hand, staring at the black ribbon wrapped around the stems—the kind you only see at funerals. The small card tucked between the flowers was written in my mother-in-law’s precise handwriting.
Sorry for your loss, Gregory. I pulled out my phone and dialed Ingred Barlo’s number. She answered on the second ring.
“Gregory.” Her voice was cold, controlled—the voice of a woman who’d spent thirty years as a federal prosecutor before retiring. “What loss, Ingred? What the hell does this mean?”
Silence stretched between us like a wire pulled taut.
“Ingred, answer me.”
The line went dead. I called back twice. Both times it went straight to voicemail.
That knot in my stomach—the one I’d carried since my wife Sarah died in a car accident eighteen months ago—tightened into something harder, something closer to fear. My son Jake was supposed to be home by four o’clock. I was a structural engineer who worked from home three days a week specifically to be there when he got off the bus from Clearwater Elementary.
At 4:15, when the yellow bus rumbled past our house in suburban Portland without stopping, I called the school. “Mr. Piper,” Principal Ellen Dyer’s voice was cautious, professional.
“Jake was signed out at 2:30 this afternoon.”
My hand tightened on the phone. “By who?”
“Let me check the log.” A pause that felt like an eternity. “It says here a family member, Ingred Barlo.
She had proper identification and said there was a family emergency.”
I was in my car before she finished the sentence. The drive to Ingred’s house took thirty-five minutes through heavy traffic. Thirty-five minutes of my mind racing through possibilities, each worse than the last.
Ingred hadn’t spoken to me in four months—not since I’d refused to let her take Jake for an entire summer to her place in Seattle. Not since I’d told her that her drinking problem meant supervised visits only. Not since the custody battle where a judge had ruled in my favor, declaring me a fit parent while Ingred’s obsessive behavior and alcohol use worked against her.
She lived in a modernist glass-and-steel mansion overlooking the Columbia River, bought with her late husband’s Boeing pension and her own substantial savings. The gate was open when I arrived. That should have been my first warning.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
TAP → NEXT PAGE → 👇
