Chapter 4 - The Ghost Road
We drove in terrified silence for three hours. The torrential rain of a sudden midnight storm battered the windshield of the truck, the wipers struggling to keep up. My daughters sat huddled together in the bench seat next to me, clutching each other, shaking from the cold and the shock.
I finally pulled into an abandoned gas station on a deserted stretch of highway to gather my thoughts. I plugged the silver thumb drive into my old laptop, hands shaking.
A single file sat on the drive: Safehouse_Route.gps.
"Dad," Lily spoke softly from the passenger side. As the most analytical of the three, she was the first to process the shock. "Maya told us what she read before the men broke in. Mom is alive? The car crash... it was all a lie?"
I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles turning white. "Yes. She did it to protect us. She was mixed up in something highly dangerous at her old accounting firm. They wanted to kill us. She faked her death so they would stop looking."
"She left us," Chloe whispered, tears spilling hot and fast down her cheeks. "She left you to do everything. She missed our first steps, our middle school graduations, our sweet sixteen. How could a mother do that?"
"She did it so you could have a sweet sixteen, Chloe," I said, my voice thick with emotion. "She made the ultimate sacrifice. She became a ghost so you could live in the light."
Maya reached over and put her hand over mine. "Where are we going, Dad?"
"The coordinates lead to an old logging cabin deep in the Cascade Mountains. We have to lay low and wait for her. She said she was coming back to us."
We drove through the night, ascending into the dark, towering pines of the mountains. The road turned to gravel, then to dirt. By the time the sun began to peek over the horizon, painting the sky in bruised shades of purple and red, we arrived at a rusted, overgrown gate.
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Hidden behind a thick grove of evergreens was a massive, fortified cabin. I stepped out of the truck, my joints aching. The front door of the cabin swung open, and a man stepped out. He was tall, heavily scarred, and held a hunting rifle resting casually against his shoulder.
"Jacob," the man said, his voice like gravel. "Sarah told me you'd be coming. My name is Vance. Get the girls inside. They aren't far behind you."
