Lisa moved her barefoot leg closer to her body, her back and shoulders aching from the stationary pose on the basement floor while she poked and prodded at the padlock securing the chain around her ankle. She inserted the whittled ends of her makeshift lock picks inside the narrow keyhole, her fingers sore from the constant repetition. She could feel the stiff wire pieces moving inside the lock, but she couldn’t force the shackle open. Repeated failure exacerbated her frustration. Despite Stu’s previous demonstration and a detailed description of the lock’s inner workings, she’d never successfully unlocked anything without a key. She had no way to know if she’d honed the rigid wire too thin or too flat or whether her technique was faulty.

She touched her sore ankle, increasingly irritated from the chain’s tight contact and the constant torsion applied with each attempt to interrogate the lock. Breaking the chain was impossible, which left her three options: give up and wait for Royce to return, stab herself in the neck and end her life, or keep working the lock.

She flexed her fingers and repositioned her leg to stretch a cramp in her calf muscle. She cracked her knuckles and clenched her fists, opening and closing her curled hands to keep the blood flowing. She massaged her forearms and rolled her shoulders. She twisted her torso and bent over to touch her fingertips to her feet. Her dire situation tapped memories she’d worked doggedly to forget: Stu dragging their seven-year-old son from the backyard swimming pool, pale and unresponsive, his depleted lungs filled with water, preventing oxygen from reaching vital organs while his heart quivered in fibrillation; the pained expression on Stu’s face as he alternated mouth-to-mouth with chest compressions; the fleeting sound of rescue sirens and the soul-crushing torment from a miracle that never happened.

You’re not a quitter, she told herself, nudging the crude lock picks at the pin and tumbler mechanism. She applied rotational pressure on the barrel and worked the pins one by one against the shackle, but the lock remained steadfast.

With God as her witness, Simon Hollis and Royce Vogel would face atonement for their sins. The more she thought about them, the more her anger overcame her fear and pushed her to attack the lock over and over until she finally succeeded, her fingers blistered and sore. By luck, or tenacity, or divine intervention, she felt the tumbler twist and the shackle pop open, releasing her from the chain around her ankle; her freedom restored in a triumph vitiated by the sound of a car door slamming.

She stood on cramped legs and moved toward the basement stairs, scaling one at a time to reach the door at the top, her newfound confidence mired in mental quicksand as she tugged on the locked handle, denying her immediate egress. She let go when light appeared through the air gap beneath the door, followed by movement inside the house.

She gripped the handrail to steady herself and hastily descended the stairs. She stifled the urge to scream when a stabbing pain pierced the bottom of her right foot firmly planted on a crooked nailhead protruding through splintered wood on the bottom step. She lifted her foot off the nail and hobbled toward the metal pail with a missing handle. She turned it upside down against the basement wall and climbed on top to reach for the narrow window above. She arched her feet, pain shooting through her injured heel as she stood on her toes with her arms outstretched, her fingers barely able to reach the shallow ledge, let alone break through the glass. She stepped down and hobbled in place for a moment, scanning the empty space for something taller to stand on.

Out of options and out of time, she scooped the padlock from the floor and stood back to hurl it at the window, striking the corner edge to crack the glass. Her second throw missed completely as the basement door opened above the stairs and the lights came on.

She grabbed the lock a third time and hurled it as hard as she could toward the rectangular windowpane barely large enough to fit through. This time, she hit her mark dead-center and shattered the glass while angry footsteps ensued.

She gave a running jump onto the metal pail and stretched for the window ledge, the balls of her feet scraping at the concrete wall while her forearms strained to lift herself high enough to reach the window and pull her upper body through the opening framed in jagged pieces of broken glass. She wiggled and squirmed and clawed her way outside the house to find herself in unfamiliar territory a million miles from her home in Florida.

Her hands mired in cuts deep enough to draw blood, she limped in the direction of a lighted barn under pitch-dark skies on a tract of adjacent property centered on a Nashville hillside with no discernible access road. She hobbled through thick brush, expecting a gunshot to ring out at any moment and end her life. But the shot never came.

She found shelter inside the barn permeated by the smell of sweet feed and alfalfa hay from equestrian stables built on one side. She hid behind a ladder extending to a loft above the main floor and crouched into a dark corner behind a stack of baled hay with a pitchfork leaning against the wall. The sting from cuts and scrapes radiated up and down both arms. Her wounded foot throbbed from the deep nail puncture.

Horses snorted in their stalls when the barn door opened wider on creaky hinges to reveal a hooded figure.

Lisa lifted her bad foot and commandeered the pitchfork, holding it horizontally in a bayonet stance. She peeked around the piles of baled hay to see a trail of blood-smeared impressions on the dusty floor. When the hooded figure approached her position, she charged into the open, thrusting the five-prong weapon at her target, who swung a length of two-by-four to knock the pitchfork away.

Lisa lunged for the barn door, her sympathetic nervous system trading fight for flight, her arms pumping wildly at her sides with each errant stride. Her pain extinguished from the rush of adrenaline, she willed herself across an open field toward the house on the neighboring property. Her lungs burned. Her stomach cramped. Her hands wept openly from broken glass embedded in her palms. The closer she came to the house, the more detail she discerned from the grounds segregated by lengths of wire fence stretched between wooden posts.

She fell forward when she tripped on a patch of tangled weeds and landed with her arms outstretched. Gulping air to feed her starving lungs, she crawled behind a massive red oak and peered through the darkness surrounding her, accompanied by the persistent hum of nocturnal insects. Spurred by movement in her peripheral vision, she lumbered toward the fence and climbed over.

She navigated another field behind a pond to emerge between a row of cypress trees facing an antebellum mansion with towering Doric columns and a two-story balcony shrouded in vines. Desperate for help, she continued across the property toward the black limousine in the circular driveway and climbed the porch stairs to pound the brass door knocker shaped like an elephant head. She bent forward with her hands on her knees to catch her breath, her scraggly, raven black hair falling in her face. “Help me!” she gasped when she heard the door open and recoiled from the tall figure wearing a goat head mask.