“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, Wild and June were on a ski vacation at a luxurious chalet in Colorado. June is a little exhausted by Wild’s manic planning of their lives, always trying to make everything a peak experience. What she really wants is to have a child but in every conversation, Wild is dead set against it. He had a change of heart as they laid together in front of a roaring fire with snow falling outside. While they’re making love, June understands she may get what she wants most and the idea suddenly terrifies her.
“Mr. Dixon, I assure you there’s nothing wrong with your body. For a man closing in on seventy, you’re in great shape.”
Gerry fastened the last few buttons of his shirt, which was not an easy task given how much his hands were shaking. He hadn’t slept properly in days, and when he did sleep, his dreams tormented him. In all of them, he was either being chased or watched. Sometimes it was Abby—but not Abby. Not his kind and tolerant wife. Instead, it was a skeletal version of her with waxy skin stretched tight across her skull, wild eyes blazing with murderous intent, and claw-like hands grasping.
“Do I look like a man who’s okay, doc? I can’t fucking sleep. Anything I eat goes right through me.”
The young doctor didn’t have the bedside manner of his father, Gerry’s long-time golfing buddy, and Gerry resented his smug little face. The little shit wasn’t even looking at him but swiping through messages on his goddamn phone. He held up a finger to say, I’ll be right with you. Gerry wanted to reach over and snap it off.
“Okay, sorry about that,” the doctor said, finally looking up from his device. “I can prescribe a different sleep medication, but it’s not uncommon for someone to experience a significant disruption in their health after losing a spouse of so many years.”
“I need more tests. Something’s wrong with me. I know my body, and something’s not right. I want you to diagnose exactly what it is, and I want you to fix it.”
“Sir, we ran a full battery of tests in the past two weeks. If there was anything wrong with you, we would have found it. CAT scans, MRIs, and blood work don’t lie. You passed all the cognitive tests with flying colors. I assure you—you’re a healthy man who could very well outlive me.”
Gerry scowled at the young doctor, his frustration simmering, but no words came to him. He turned and grabbed his suit jacket off the hanger on the back of the exam room door. He pulled it on briskly, then raised his hand in a dismissive wave, opened the door, and started down the hallway of the hospital wing that bore his name on a large bronze plaque at the entrance.
Reynolds, the bulging specimen in a tailored suit that he was, jumped up out of the waiting room chair, pulled his phone from his breast pocket, and hurried to catch up as Gerry moved at a fast clip toward the exit. “I’ll call Jim to bring the car around,” he said, falling in step at his normal post behind and to the right of his boss.
Gerry didn’t acknowledge him but kept moving. There was no time to waste. Time was all he thought about now, and he felt it closing on him like the jaws of a vice. He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed Patricia. “Hey, cancel everything on my calendar today.” Before she could protest or tell him why he couldn’t do that, he hung up and shoved the phone back in his pocket.
Twenty minutes later, Gerry was back home. He told Reynolds he wouldn’t be going out for the rest of the day but still preferred the bodyguard stay on the premises and out of his hair. Alone in the house he had been mostly avoiding since his wife’s death, Gerry moved from room to room, leaving a piece of clothing as he progressed. He kicked off his Ferragamo loafers in the formal dining room. They tumbled across the pile of the massive Persian rug and settled upside down and sideways in a manner that would have horrified their maker. He tossed his suit jacket on the back of the low-backed leather sofa in the living room and stood before the five-by-eight portrait of his family hanging above the fireplace.
He had commissioned a renowned French painter best known for his austere portraits. Critics raved that he was a John Singer Sargent for troubled times, and Abby had met him at a meet-and-greet exclusively for platinum donors at the High. All Gerry saw was drab, ghostly figures with grossly exaggerated features. They sat for the portrait in the back garden when Millie was ten. She wouldn’t be still, so the artist had taken a series of photos and returned to his studio in Nice. The six iterations Gerry made the artist paint were all uniquely horrid. In every single one, Gerry’s cheeks looked like jowls, and his belly pooched out prominently. The pretentious Frenchman was a pill to work with, so Gerry had delegated the feedback and negotiation to one of the young bulldogs he hired every year who would happily tear out the throat of an orphan if it gained Gerry’s favor.
Unsurprisingly, the enraged artist eventually quit and demanded his full fee. The young bulldog had returned from Nice with a nice tan and the canvases in tow. Gerry withheld fifty percent of the artist’s outrageous commission and diverted $5,000 of it to a promising young art student from SCAD down the street to paint over the canvas, touching up the work of the “master.” Abby was kept in the dark from all this, which was for the best because the unveiling of the portrait was to be a surprise at her birthday party. In this final version of the portrait, the muted grays and browns were punched up with rosy highlights, and their faces glowed as if lit from within. Gerry saw the man he knew he was. The kid might have been a little too generous with Gerry’s jawline and the broadness of his shoulders, but with the size of the check Gerry had stroked for him, the young art student would have painted him as Hitler in garter belts if asked. To ensure the truth of the painting’s touch-up was never brought to light, Gerry had directed Eileen to write an iron-clad agreement for the kid to sign, and had it delivered by the same bulldog who had stiffed the Frenchman.
Now, the painting brought him no joy, and a part of him that he would never acknowledge wished it was the original, where the artist had captured the sad, grasping figure he was. Gerry untucked his tailored shirt and, rather than unbutton it, tore it open, enjoying the sound of the buttons popping off and flying around the room like beetles skittering across the marble floor tiles.
He moved to the wet bar by the French doors that opened onto the back lawn and poured himself a Scotch so deep that when he dropped the block of ice into it, the whisky flooded over the edges of the crystal tumbler. He took a long drink, and some of the whisky dribbled down his chin and into the silver hairs on his chest. When had he gotten so old? It seemed that every moment since that evening in the car when Wild told him when he was going to die, Gerry had begun aging like some time-lapse sequence in a horror movie.
He kept seeing the polished wood of Abby’s casket being covered by dirt from a backhoe when he refused to leave her graveside until the job was done. He wished he hadn’t done that, didn’t have that visual stuck in his brain forever, but something had compelled him. He wanted to see it through, as though it were one honorable duty he could perform as atonement for the decades of his deception of Abigail Thorne. But it wasn’t sadness or longing for her that this image invoked—it was abject terror.
He imagined himself in that coffin, clawing at the silk lining, and his heart began to gallop. His stomach revolted. He barely had time to get the door open before he was spewing hot bile across the patio and into the sculpted hedges that stood like sentinels in their enormous terra-cotta planters on either side of the entryway. When the heaves subsided, he returned to the bar to retrieve his drink, filled his mouth, swished the expensive whisky like mouthwash, then spat it into the hedge and walked down the steps to the lawn.
The manicured grass between his toes was comforting, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had enjoyed this sensation. He walked across the lawn, then around the landscaped beds to the pool, which shimmered in the sun. He set his drink down on a table and tugged off his pants and underwear. He then took his drink and climbed the ladder into water so cold it made his testicles retreat. He chuckled at the futility of the miserable things, so saggy like the rest of him. When his body was taut and new, he had wasted it in boardrooms, climate-controlled offices, and sleeping with a woman he couldn’t really love.
He swam awkwardly, like a seal with one wounded flipper, his drink clutched precariously above the water, until he got to the shallow end where he could stand. He tossed the drink back, swallowing the remaining whisky, then hurled the Waterford crystal as hard as he could, hoping to have the satisfaction of it shattering to bits against the stucco retaining wall at the edge of the garden. Instead, it landed with a dull thunk in the mulch.
He plunged under the water and screamed until all the air was out of his lungs. Then he rose to the surface, gulping for more, only to plunge again and repeat. After four times, he was spent. Between the lack of oxygen and the alcohol, his brain cells were drifting apart, floating like the tiny golden leaves that covered the surface of the pool, which would soon be covered for the season. He lay on his back and tried to float, but his bony legs sank like he was made of stone.
Why had he looked at the goddamn notebook? Why had he made Wild tell him? Why had he made any of the decisions he had made in his life? To begin asking now was to be sucked down into a swirling tar pit. What did a man who had spent his life clawing up and to the right do when there was no up and to the right left? To make matters worse, his Millie was in South America on some spiritual journey, not with her father who had given her everything, but with that sorry piece of shit for a brother-in-law who never worked for a goddamn thing and moped around like the saddest man in the world.
He didn’t have some fucking superpower. It was all bullshit. Like everything else about him. But it wasn’t. As fantastical as it seemed, Wild Thorne knew when everyone’s ticket was punched. If there was a god, which there wasn’t, why in the hell would he bestow such power on the shoulders of such a weak man?
They would be coming back in two days, not today as he had requested. Millie sounded different on the phone. When he had tried to catch her up on the acquisition deal they had been working on, she brushed it off, like she could care less about who they were trying to position to get a board seat. That was not his Millie. She sweated over every detail. She was driven to win any competition. What little she had shared was Wild this and Wild that. Fuck Wild. He had done nothing to deserve the privilege he enjoyed, and he had no stomach for any of it anyway. Wild was a weak, pathetic man.
Gerry swam back toward the ladder. Underwater, he had an urge to just stay there and drown himself, not because he wanted to die, but because he didn’t like the idea of anyone or anything determining his fate. Wouldn’t that wipe the smug look off Wild’s fucking face if he got it wrong? But that was the whisky talking. Gerry wouldn’t go down without a fight, and he damn sure wouldn’t be forgotten or have his baby girl adopt a new father when he was gone.
He found a towel in the pool house and dried himself with renewed vigor. To win, he had always had to be willing to go above and beyond, to do what others weren’t willing to do. Every major business coup in Thorne Enterprise’s portfolio, which had grown twenty-fold under his leadership, was the product of him being able to get into the mindset of his quarry. What did they want most? What were they afraid of? How could they be cornered into a position where he could take advantage and keep that advantage?
Wild didn’t want the money. The family legacy made him ashamed. Well, that could be fixed easily enough. Let’s see how he did when all of it was taken away in this last, frail chapter of his life. Gerry had already set things in motion by initiating a review of the trust. It would be easy enough to oust Wild from his long-standing perch in the theater. True, Thorne was no longer the primary benefactor, but that would all change with the stroke of a check that came with some non-negotiable terms to “renovate” the rooms above the theater to provide workshop space where underprivileged kids in the community could attend master classes with actors, musicians, and dancers who traveled through.
Gerry grinned at being able to call his brother-in-law’s bluff. When he was through, the best Wild could hope for would be a studio apartment outside the perimeter. Let him live out his days taking the bus and eating TV dinners.
Gerry would, of course, need to make his approach from the side. To directly confront Millie’s favorite uncle would set her off, and he would lose his baby girl forever. By the time he made it back up to the house and had poured himself another drink, he had it all mapped out and was moving on to figure out what else might be gained. If there was a secret to his success, it was: never leave anything on the table when you walked away from the game. And it was all a game.
Might there be ways to leverage Wild’s carnival trick before he put him out to pasture? Surely there was an upside to knowing exactly when anyone was going to meet their maker. Thinking about the upside always had a way of slowing Gerry’s pulse and unfurrowing his brow.
In the kitchen, he pulled a tin of Royal Ossetra caviar from the Sub-Zero refrigerator along with a jar of pickles and the remaining hunk of Velveeta cheese wrapped in foil. Using some stale Saltine crackers he found in the pantry, he assembled lunch, which he took in his study while sitting in front of the computer where he could review the latest earnings dashboard.
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