Chapter 4 - The Color of Terror
For three terrifying seconds, Ethan looked at me as if he were staring face-to-face with a creature risen directly from a graveyard.
His knees buckled slightly. He reached out and grabbed the edge of a steel fish rack to keep from collapsing onto the concrete floor. His lips parted, but no sound came out—only a pathetic, dry rasp of air.
“C-Claire...?” he whispered, his eyes bulging as he looked from my face down to my boots and back up again. “You’re... you were in... how are you...?”
“Surprised to see me, darling?” I asked, taking a slow, steady step toward him across the freezing floor. The sound of my heels clicking against the concrete sounded like gunshots in the quiet warehouse.
Frank Miller and the two dock workers looked back and forth between us, completely bewildered by the theatrical tension in the air.
“Mr. Caldwell told us you were trapped in the freezer all night, Mrs. Caldwell,” Frank said, frowning deeply. “He was acting like...”
“Like a man who thought he had successfully buried his wife?” I supplied smoothly, stopping five feet away from Ethan.
Ethan’s face turned the color of spoiled milk. He raised a trembling hand, pointing a shaking finger at me. “She’s... she’s crazy! She’s hallucinating! She must have left the building through the back service hatch before I got here—she’s trying to frame me!”
“Frame you for what, Ethan?” I tilted my head, looking at him with a mixture of pity and utter contempt. “You haven't even explained why you were locking Freezer 12 from a remote terminal at one-twenty in the morning.”
“I didn't—I never touched a terminal—”
“We have your MAC address, your personal login credentials, and the encrypted timestamp of the remote override command originating directly from your home study desktop,” Andrew Mercer’s voice rang out clearly from the doorway.
My attorney stepped into the warehouse, flanked by two uniformed South Portland police officers and a state detective whose badge glinted under the industrial lights.
The detective stepped directly toward Ethan, pulling a pair of steel handcuffs from his tactical belt.
“Ethan Caldwell,” the detective said, his voice cold and flat. “You’re under arrest for attempted premeditated homicide, conspiracy, and digital tampering of industrial safety systems.”
“No! This is a setup! My mother—my lawyer—you can't do this!” Ethan screamed, thrashing wildly as the two officers grabbed his arms, forcing him face-first against the cold steel racks of frozen salmon.
As the handcuffs clicked shut around his wrists, Ethan twisted his head around, his eyes locking onto mine with desperate, pathetic fury.
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“Claire! Please! It was a joke! A stupid joke! Mom put me up to it! Tell them to let me go! We’ve been married eleven years!”
“Eleven years,” I repeated softly, walking past him toward the exit. “And in all that time, Ethan, you never once learned how cold it really is when you run out of money.”
