A Frog In The Terrarium

Zoe had not left her apartment in almost four months. The last time had been a Thursday, a trip to her primary physician to check up on a worrying rash that was developing on her calf. Her father had given her a ride. She had to stare at the patterns etched into the office floor while talking to her doctor to stop herself from dissolving. She had made it there and back to her safe place. She called that a victory.

Seattle pressed against her windows in the dark, the city noise a low and constant reminder of how many people were out there, moving through spaces she could not occupy. Her apartment was the right size. Everything she needed came to her. Groceries through an app, medications through the mail, her entire professional life through a laptop and a broadband connection. She had worked for Divicore for five years and had never met a single colleague in person. Her supervisor communicated through email and the occasional voicemails. Her quarterly reviews happened on video calls. This was fine. This was the arrangement. She was good at her job, kept to herself, and the world kept its distance. Most days that felt like enough.

She was brushing her teeth when the knock came.

She froze. The brush stopped moving. The knock came again, two flat impacts against the front door, patient and even. She rinsed her mouth and stood very still in the bathroom doorway for a moment, running through the list of things it could be. It was almost ten o’clock at night. Deliveries did not come at ten o’clock at night. She crept to the door and looked through the peephole. Nothing. No one. Just the dim yellow of the hallway light.

She opened the door.

A cardboard box sat on the welcome mat, roughly the size of a microwave. Her name was on it. Her address. No return address, no shipping label, no postage of any kind. Just her name in plain black print, centered on the top flap like a title.

She looked down the hallway in both directions. Empty.

She did not want to bring it inside. She stood there for almost a full minute, weight shifting between her feet, before she crouched and lifted it. It was lighter than she expected. And there was something inside it. She could hear it. A faint and irregular movement, something like rustling in undergrowth.

She carried it to the kitchen table and cut the tape with scissors.

Inside the box, packed with no padding or material of any kind, sitting directly against the cardboard, was a terrarium. Glass-sided, maybe twenty inches long, with a mesh lid. Inside the terrarium was a layer of dark soil, a few flat rocks, some sticks, leaves, and a frog. It was sitting very still on the largest rock, a mottled brownish-green, ordinary-looking from the front. Then she tilted her head and saw the back.

There was an eye in it.

Set into the skin between the frog’s shoulder blades, flush with the surface, was something that looked like a human eye. The iris was a pale grey-green, the sclera threaded with faint pink veins. The skin around it gathered in soft folds on either side, folds that moved slightly when the frog breathed, rising and falling like lids without lashes, the edges smooth and continuous with the rest of its back, as though whatever was beneath had simply grown there and the skin had learned to accommodate it. She stared at it for a long time. The eye did not move. The pupil was fixed, slightly dilated, pointing at nothing.

She decided it was glass. A prosthetic, maybe, or some elaborate prank. Someone had implanted a very convincing artificial eye into this animal and left it on her doorstep for reasons she could not begin to organize. It was strange, it was cruel to the frog, and it was something she would sort out in the morning. She would call someone. A vet, or the police, or someone.

She was reaching for the mesh lid to look closer when the eye moved.

It shifted. Slowly, the pupil dragging from one side to the other until it found her. The skin folds around it tightened. The eye blinked. A full, deliberate blink, the upper fold pressing down and drawing back up. When it opened again it was still looking at her, directly at her, with what she could only register as attention.

She shoved the lid back onto the terrarium, carried the whole thing back to the front door, and put it outside on the mat. Her hands were shaking. She went back to the kitchen, stood at the sink, gripped the counter, and breathed through her nose until the worst of it passed.

Then she called her father.

He arrived in twenty minutes. She watched from the peephole before she opened the door. Even then she kept the chain on for a second, just to look at his face and confirm it was actually him.

“Don’t bring it inside,” she said. “Please.”

He looked at the box on the mat, then at her. He nodded and went to crouch over it. She left the door open a few inches and stood back. She heard him open the box, heard the pause, heard him say, quietly, “what the hell…”, then louder, “dear God, what is this thing…”.

He came inside, and she closed the door behind him. He sat at the kitchen table, she sat across from him, and he looked at her with an expression she recognized, the one he used when he was trying to seem calmer than he was for her benefit.

“It’s real,” he said. “The frog is real.”

“I know.”

“And the eye…”

“I know.”

He rubbed his face with both hands. He said he’d never seen anything like it, that it looked like it had just always been there, like it grew that way. They sat with that for a moment. Zoe’s knee was bouncing under the table. They talked it through and arrived at what felt like the only reasonable next step. He would take it home. In the morning, he would bring it to a veterinarian, or at least call one, and try to get some explanation for what they were looking at. Some kind of genetic thing. An experiment. Something.

He left with the box under his arm. She watched from the window until his car was gone from the parking lot below.

She went to bed. Laying on her back, she looked at the ceiling and thought about the way the folds of skin had tightened during the blink, the brief and terrible wrongness of it. She did not sleep for a long time. When she finally did, it was shallow and offered her nothing.

She called her father at eight in the morning. The phone rang seven times before going to voicemail. She waited ten minutes and called again. Voicemail. She set the phone on the counter, watched it for a second, then told herself it was fine, he was in with the vet, he had left his phone in the car, he was in the shower. Something. He would call back.

She called Marcy.

“Hey, I need to talk to someone,” she said hurriedly when Marcy picked up. “Something happened last night.”

Marcy listened without interrupting, which was one of the things Zoe valued most about her. When Zoe finished, Marcy was quiet for a moment before saying it sounded like something out of a nightmare. She said she’d come by after work. She said not to spiral.

Zoe thanked her, hung up, and opened her laptop to get some hours in. It was the kind of morning that required routine. She pulled up Divicore’s systems, started with the operations account reconciliation she’d been working through the day before, and felt the floor drop out from under her.

She checked the figure three times. She refreshed the page. She pulled the transaction log and scrolled back through the previous forty-eight hours, methodical and careful, the way she did everything, and found nothing that explained it.

Six million, two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Gone. No flagged transfers, no matching withdrawals in the records she had access to, no corresponding entries anywhere in the ledger. There one day. Gone overnight. As though it had simply stopped existing.

Her hands were very still on the keyboard. Outside, Seattle went about its morning. She picked up her phone to call her father again, but the call went nowhere, so she sat alone in her apartment with the transaction log open on the screen, and the memory of that grey-green eye watching her from inside the terrarium. She could not decide which of those things frightened her more. Suddenly, it dawned on her that she was going to have to do the things she hated most. She was going to have to talk to a lot of people about this.

Zoe sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets, her phone in both hands, and tried to breathe. The breathing technique her psychiatrist had given her was four counts in, five counts held, six counts out. She made it through two cycles before her chest tightened, so she abandoned it and just sat there, letting the worst of her anxiety move through her.

Then she stood up and called her supervisor.

His name was Gerald Puth. She had spoken to him maybe thirty times in five years, always by phone, always briefly, always about numbers. She had prepared what she was going to say before she dialed, written bullet points on a notepad, and she pressed record on her phone before the call connected.

He picked up on the third ring and said her name with mild surprise, as though she were an estranged family member that had finally decided to get in touch.

She told him about the missing money. She kept her voice level and followed the bullet points. Six million, two hundred and forty thousand dollars, absent from the operations account as of this morning, no corresponding transfers in the records she could access, transaction log clean on its face. She told him the account number, the figure, and the date of the last confirmed balance. Her hands were shaking badly enough that she had to set the phone on the counter and use the speaker.

Gerald was quiet for a moment after she finished. Then he said he would check the accounts himself and get back to her.

She asked if he believed her.

He said he would check the accounts.

She got off the call and stood at the counter until her hands settled. There was a faint tremor still in her fingers when she opened her laptop, the residue of speaking to someone she barely knew. She hated the way her own body turned every conversation with anyone other than her dad or Marcy into a fight or flight response.

She started pulling transactions.

Six months of records, every line item, every transfer in and out of the accounts she had access to. She copied everything into a spreadsheet and started tagging and sorting, building a picture of what normal looked like so that abnormal would stand out against it. It was meticulous work; it was the kind of work she was good at. The anxiety receded to a background hum while her hands were moving and her mind had something to hold.

She drafted an email to each member of Divicore’s board of directors. She wrote it carefully, kept the tone factual and documented, attached the transaction log, noted that she had reported the discrepancy to Gerald Puth at nine fourteen in the morning and recorded the call. She was thorough. She was thorough because some part of her had already done the math on how this might look, the accountant who discovers the missing money, the one with access to the records, the one who works alone from home and has no colleagues to account for her hours or her character. She sent the emails and went back to the transactions.

By noon she had been through three months of data and found nothing obvious. She ordered lunch. A sandwich, soup, something easy. She heard the knock at the door twenty minutes later and went to answer it without thinking.

She opened the door.

Her bag of food was sitting on the welcome mat. Underneath it, serving as a kind of shelf, was the cardboard box.

She grabbed the bag, pulled it through the gap, and shut the door hard. She stood in the entryway with the bag in her hands and her heart going very fast. She called her father. Voicemail. She called again. Voicemail. She called a third time. This time when the voicemail picked up she left a message, her voice coming out tighter than she intended, telling him to please call her back, that the box was back on her doorstep, that she was worried about him, that she needed to know he was okay.

He would not have left the box on her doorstep. He had taken it with him. That was the last thing she had seen, him walking to his car with it under his arm. He would not have returned it and left without saying anything to her. That was not something he would do.

She called the police.

It was worse than the call with Gerald. The dispatcher transferred her to someone who asked her to explain the situation from the beginning, and she tried, but the words came out in the wrong order and she had to stop and restart twice. She could hear herself losing coherence and that awareness made it worse. She got the important parts out. Father, sixty-one, had not answered his phone since last night, had been in possession of something unusual that had now reappeared on her doorstep, she was concerned for his safety. The officer taking the report asked for her father’s address. She gave it. He asked for her father’s full name and date of birth, she gave those too. He asked if there was any reason her father might be unreachable, travel, work, anything like that.

She said no. She said he always answered.

The officer asked if she was alright. His voice had shifted slightly, taken on a careful quality.

She told him she had crippling social anxiety, that phone calls were difficult for her, and that she was giving him the most accurate information she had.

He told her someone would follow up.

She hung up, sat with her untouched food at the kitchen table, and looked at the bag without opening it. The soup was probably getting cold. She unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite, but her body rejected the whole idea. She put it down, covered it back up, and sat there.

The box was on her doorstep. The frog was in the box, presumably. She did not know what she was supposed to do with it. She would wait for Marcy. Marcy would come after work, she would not have to face the box alone, they would figure out what to do together. Maybe they would drive it somewhere. Maybe Marcy would take it. Zoe did not need to decide anything right now.

A knock at her door.

She went to the peephole. The hallway was empty. The box sat on the mat.

She turned away from the door.

The knocking started again immediately.

She went back to the peephole. Empty hallway. She stood there for a full thirty seconds, watching. Nothing moved. She stepped back.

The knock came before she had fully turned around.

She spun, pressed her eye to the peephole, and saw nothing. She stayed there, pressed against the door, breathing through her mouth. A minute passed. Two. She stepped back very slowly, watching the peephole as though she could still see through it from across the room.

Knocking.

She kept the chain latched and cracked the door two inches. The air from the hallway came through, slightly cooler. She leaned toward the gap.

“I will call the police,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “Whoever is out there needs to stop. I will call the police right now.”

Nothing answered. She looked down through the gap at the box, and that was when she saw it. A folded piece of paper, taped to the top flap, that had not been there before.

She reached through the gap, pulled the paper free, shut the door, locked it, and put the chain back on. She unfolded the note at the kitchen table.

The handwriting was neat and small. It said: “Take good care of these frogs Zoe, and Divicore will get its six million back.”

She read it thrice.

Frogs. Plural.

She looked at the box. She had not opened it. She did not want to open it. She thought about the eye moving in the kitchen light, the slow deliberate drag of the pupil finding her face.

Marcy came through the door with her coat still on, her keys in her hand, and looked at the box on the mat. She picked it up and brought it inside to the kitchen counter.

After opening it, both women cautiously looked into the box.

Two frogs now. Side by side on the flat rock, motionless, each with the same grey-green eye set into the skin of its back. The same smooth lids without lashes, the same faint veining in the sclera. The second eye was identical to the first in every detail, as though they had come from the same source.

Marcy leaned close to the glass. The eyes did not move toward her. They were both angled slightly to the left, toward Zoe, who was standing near the refrigerator.

Zoe took a step to the right. Both eyes shifted.

She took a step back toward the hallway, putting the kitchen wall between herself and the terrarium. She heard Marcy say, from the kitchen, that they were still pointed her way. Through the wall.

Marcy straightened up and looked at her with an expression caught between fascination and concern. She said they were without question the freakiest things she had ever seen in her life. Then she said that the note was another matter entirely, that what it described was extortion or blackmail or something close enough that it didn’t matter what you called it, and that Zoe needed to have it on record with the police regardless of the frogs.

Zoe said she had already called them once today.

Marcy said she would make the call herself.

She did, standing in the kitchen, efficient and clear in the way Zoe never managed to be on the phone with strangers. The voice on the other end of the line said they were sending someone.

They sat in the living room while they waited. Marcy kept glancing back toward the kitchen. She got up once and stood in the doorway, watching the terrarium from a distance, and said it was genuinely bizarre, the way both eyes tracked to wherever Zoe was sitting. Not moving constantly, not darting around. Just adjusting.

Zoe told her she did not find it interesting. She told her it made her feel sick.

The officers arrived twenty minutes later, two of them. Zoe felt her body do what it always did when strangers came through her door. The shaking started in her hands before moving up through her arms. She sat on the couch with her knees together, her fingers laced, and gave herself something to press against. One of the officers asked her to walk him through the timeline, so she opened her mouth. What came out was thin, halting, and too quiet.

Marcy took over. She laid it out in sequence, the box the first night, the father taking it, the father going silent, the reappearance on the doorstep, the knocking, the note, the second frog. The officer took notes. The other one stood near the kitchen doorway and looked at the terrarium for a long time without saying anything.

When it was Zoe’s turn again, she was asked direct questions she could answer with short responses. She nodded more than she spoke. She was shaking the entire time, knew they could see it, but could not do anything about that.

They took the terrarium and they took the note, bagged separately. They said someone would be in touch regarding her father’s missing person report. They said to call if anything else arrived or if she received any communication related to the note. Then they left, and the apartment felt looser without them in it, the air easier to move through.

Zoe asked Marcy to stay the night.

Marcy said she had to be up early for work but that she wasn’t going anywhere tonight. She squeezed Zoe’s shoulder and went to find extra blankets. Zoe sat on the couch and felt some portion of the day’s tension shift into something duller and more manageable.

They watched something on television that neither of them paid attention to. Marcy fell asleep on the couch around ten. Zoe was almost there herself, her eyes going heavy, the apartment quiet, when the knocking started.

It was nothing like the knocking from before. This was frantic, both fists, fast and irregular, the kind of knocking that had no patience in it. And underneath it, between the impacts, a low continuous moan that climbed and fell.

Zoe was off the couch and standing against the far wall before she was fully awake. Marcy sat up and looked at her. The knocking kept going. The moaning was louder now, strained, like something being forced up through the throat.

Marcy stood, put a hand on Zoe’s arm, and told her to stay back. She went to the door and looked through the peephole, her whole body changed, the stillness that comes before action, and she had the chain off and the door open before Zoe could say anything.

Zoe’s father fell through the doorway and hit the floor.

He was on his hands and knees, making the sound they had heard through the door, low and continuous and wrong, and he was speaking in something that was not any language Zoe had ever encountered. Not fragments of one. Not something she could locate. The syllables had no pattern she could find, no rhythm she could follow. He said them urgently, insistently, the way a person gives directions to someone when they are running out of time.

Marcy was kneeling beside him. Zoe stood in the middle of the room and looked at her father’s face.

His eyes were gone. Not closed. Not injured in a way that left them partially intact. They were gone, the sockets dark and torn open. The blood from them was not gushing the way blood gushes from an acute wound, but instead moving slowly, welling up in a steady and almost patient way, running in two thin lines down the sides of his face and pooling on the floor. His hands were covered in it.

He kept speaking in the language neither of them knew. His hands moved against the floor, fingers spreading and contracting.

Behind him, through the still-open door, sitting squarely in the center of the welcome mat, was the box.

Marcy called 911.

The paramedics came in fast and got her father onto a gurney. Zoe held his hand until they made her step back. He was still talking in that language, the syllables tumbling over each other, and by the time they had him stabilized enough to move he had stopped talking and started screaming. Not only in pain. The sound had a quality she could not name, something communicative, directed, like he was trying to get something across to someone who was not in the room.

They wheeled him out. The screaming went down the hallway, into the elevator, then it was gone, and the apartment felt gutted without it.

A third officer had arrived with the paramedics. He was younger than the two from before, and he stood in the entryway while Marcy went through everything again, the whole sequence, her voice steady and thorough. Zoe sat on the couch with her arms wrapped around herself and listened to the story of the last twenty-four hours as though it had happened to someone else.

The officer moved through the apartment as Marcy talked, and when he got back to the entryway, he picked up the box from the doorstep where it had been sitting and set it on the kitchen counter. He looked inside for a moment and then looked back at them.

He said there were four frogs now.

Zoe stood up from the couch. Marcy said that was not possible.

He said he was looking at four frogs. Marcy looked in and confirmed.

Zoe pressed her palms against the sides of her head to try and find the edges of the situation, but could not. Her heart was doing something irregular, and she was aware of every beat in a way that was not normal. She told Marcy she thought she might be having a heart attack.

Marcy told her to take her emergency medication. Her voice was calm and practical. She pointed toward the bathroom.

Zoe went to the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and got the Xanax her psychiatrist had prescribed for exactly this category of moment. She took one and sat on the edge of the tub for a moment, pressing her feet flat against the tile. She heard the officer in the hallway, on his radio, saying he was going to step out to the cruiser and try to reach the other responding officers and his supervisor. She heard the front door close.

She went back to the living room.

Marcy was standing at the kitchen counter with her face six inches from the open box.

Zoe stopped in the doorway. She watched Marcy for a moment. Marcy did not move. Her hands were at her sides and she was completely still, just looking down into the terrarium with an expression Zoe could not see from behind.

Zoe asked her what she was doing.

Marcy simply responded that they were fascinating.

Zoe said the way she was standing there was starting to frighten her. She asked Marcy to step away from the box.

Marcy said it was fine.

Zoe crossed the kitchen and put her hand on Marcy’s arm and pulled. Marcy did not move. It was not that she braced against the pull or resisted it consciously. She simply did not move, as though she had become very heavy, as though she had taken root there at the counter. Her eyes did not come up from the terrarium.

Zoe pulled harder and told her to stop it. She said her name. She said it again.

Marcy told Zoe in a somber tone to look at the frogs.

Zoe let go, stepped back, the crying coming before she could do anything about it. She stood in the middle of her kitchen and sobbed, begging Marcy to look at her, to please just step away from the box and come sit down with her. She said her name four or five times. She said she was scared.

Marcy said nothing. She stood at the counter and looked into the box.

The knock at the door was the officer coming back. When Zoe didn’t answer he must have heard her crying because he let himself in, the door having been left unlocked. He came into the kitchen, looked at Marcy and then at Zoe, and asked what was going on.

Marcy turned her head toward him. She told him he needed to look at the frogs.

Zoe screamed no, but it was too late.

The officer looked into the box.

The kitchen went quiet. Marcy turned back to the terrarium. The officer stood beside her and also looked down into it. Neither of them spoke. Neither of them moved. The officer’s radio crackled once from his belt and neither of them reacted to it.

Zoe backed against the far wall and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor. The Xanax was beginning to soften the edges of things, the way it always did, a gentle erosion of the panic’s sharpest points, but she hated it right now because she did not want soft edges, she wanted to be fully present for whatever was happening in her kitchen, she wanted all of herself available.

Marcy raised her hands to her face.

Her fingers pushed themselves into her eye sockets with a gentle pop as her eyes ruptured. The officer did the same, calm, methodical. The blood came freely, ran down their forearms, and dripped from their elbows onto the kitchen floor.

When they turned around they were still standing straight. They walked toward Zoe where she sat against the wall, stopped in front of her, and stood there, their empty sockets facing her. They were speaking. Both of them. The same language her father had been screaming in the hallway. The same syllables, the same rhythm she could not find, the same quality of something being communicated to someone who could not receive it.

They stood over her, speaking in soft tones to a woman who had lost herself.

The door had been left open.

A figure appeared in it. An elderly woman in a housecoat, her hair loose, her feet in slippers, the kind of person who investigates strange sounds in hallways because she has lived long enough to decide that is her right.

She took in the scene in pieces. Zoe on the floor. Marcy and the officer standing over her, speaking in low continuous tones. The woman’s expression moved through confusion and into something harder.

She told them to leave the poor girl alone. Her voice was loud and without hesitation, the voice of someone accustomed to being listened to.

Marcy and the officer did not turn around.

The woman stormed into the apartment. She was moving toward Zoe with her hand outstretched when she got close enough to see the state of the others’ faces. Her phone quickly came out and was calling 911. She was talking to Zoe at the same time, telling her to give her her hand, come on, give me your hand, let’s get you up.

Zoe took her hand. She got her feet under her. The woman was stronger than she looked, or maybe Zoe was lighter than she should have been, because she came up off the floor with less effort than she expected and stood swaying slightly in the kitchen while the woman spoke rapidly into the phone beside her.

They started moving toward the door.

Marcy and the officer turned around.

They followed. Not quickly, not with any apparent urgency, just orienting toward Zoe and moving in her direction the way a compass needle moves toward north. The woman saw them coming and raised her voice, still on the phone, shouting down the hallway for help, someone please come and help.

Doors opened. Two men came out of an apartment further down, and a younger woman from across the hall, all of them in various states of undress, the hour being what it was. They saw the officer and Marcy and what was wrong with their faces and there was a moment of collective stillness before the men moved forward and put themselves between Zoe and the two of them. Marcy walked into the resistance without breaking her cadence or her silence. The officer did the same. They were not violent, exactly. They were simply continuous. They pressed forward with a patience that was worse than aggression, still murmuring the language, their empty faces tilted toward the spot where Zoe stood behind the wall of neighbors.

The elderly woman got Zoe through the door of her own apartment and closed it behind them. The sounds from the hallway came through muffled. The woman’s apartment smelled like tea and something floral. Zoe stood in the middle of it and shook.

The paramedics arrived first, then more police, and Zoe heard the sounds of the hallway changing, voices of authority, the particular commotion of people being physically restrained. Someone knocked on the neighbor’s door and identified themselves as police. The woman opened it a few inches and spoke to them before opening it the rest of the way.

Through the open door Zoe could see Marcy and the officer without eyes being guided toward gurneys. Guided was not quite the right word. They had to be moved by force, their orientation never shifting, their faces always finding Zoe through the gap of the open door regardless of which direction their bodies were being pushed. The officers subduing them were not rough but they were firm, and even strapped down Marcy turned her head to the side and kept her ruined face pointed at the doorway, at Zoe, the way the eyes in the terrarium had pointed through walls.

Zoe was inconsolable. She was aware of this clinical fact about herself, that she had passed some threshold beyond which the usual mechanisms of accommodation were not available. The woman sat beside her on the couch, held both her hands, and said things Zoe could hear but not retain.

A paramedic came and crouched in front of her. He asked her name. Zoe could not produce it. He asked if she was hurt and she shook her head. The woman told him about the evening, about what she had seen in the kitchen. The paramedic looked at Zoe’s eyes and her hands and the way she was breathing and said they should bring her in.

In the ambulance they gave her something through a small mask held near her face, something that moved through her faster than the Xanax had, softening not just the edges but the whole shape of things. She was on a gurney, there were two paramedics, the interior of the ambulance was bright, white, and very close. Two strangers. She could feel them near her in the way she always felt strangers, as a pressure, a wrongness in the air around her body. She wanted to tell them she was fine. She wanted to ask about her father, about Marcy, about whether her father was at this hospital or another one. The words assembled themselves somewhere inside her but did not come out.

One of the paramedics said her name with concern and asked her to stay with him. His voice came from a long way away.

She was looking at the ceiling of the ambulance and then she was not looking at anything. The seizure moved through her like a tide coming in, complete and indifferent, and she went with it into the dark.

She came up out of it slowly, the way you surface from deep water, pressure releasing in gradual increments. The ceiling was a different white than the ambulance. There were sounds she identified one at a time. A monitor beside her. Ventilation. Distant voices. The smell was antiseptic and particular, the smell of a place she had avoided at all costs.

A nurse was writing something on a clipboard at the foot of the bed. Zoe made a sound before she meant to and the nurse looked up. The nurse had a calm face, moved without suddenness, and said good morning in a voice pitched low, the way people spoke to those they knew were frightened. It helped, marginally.

Zoe asked what had happened.

The nurse told her she had seized in the ambulance. That she had been brought in and had been monitored through the night. She asked how Zoe was feeling.

Zoe said she was groggy. She asked if they had her cell phone.

The nurse checked and said no, nothing had come in with her.

Zoe asked about her father. She asked about Marcy. She tried to describe them, stopped, and said they would be the ones without eyes. She watched the nurse’s face change when she said it, something moving behind the professional stillness, a flicker of recognition she did not try to hide.

The nurse set the clipboard down.

She told Zoe her father had arrived in a state of severe agitation. That he had become violent with the staff during assessment, not angry exactly, directed, as though he was trying to get somewhere he was being kept from. They had restrained him. He had pushed against the restraints with a force that was not consistent with his age or his injuries, and he had sustained fractures in both wrists before they were able to sedate him.

Zoe gripped the edges of her bed.

The nurse said the sedation had been medically necessary. That the dosage was appropriate. That sometimes there were reactions that could not be predicted or explained.

Zoe asked her to say it plainly.

The nurse said her father had not responded well to the sedative and that he had passed away in the night. She said she was very sorry.

Zoe heard this. She heard it the way you hear something in a language you are still learning, the words arriving correctly but the meaning taking a moment longer to follow. Then it followed. She turned toward the window and cried without making much sound, the deepest kind of crying, the kind that does not perform itself.

The nurse stayed in the room. She did not speak, which was the right choice.

After a while she told Zoe that the doctors wanted to speak with her, that three patients had come in with the same presentation and they were trying to understand it. She asked if Zoe felt up to talking.

Zoe through the crying said she could try but that social anxiety made it very difficult, especially with people she did not know.

The nurse said she could just talk to her, and she could relay everything to the doctors.

So Zoe told her. All of it, in the correct order, from the knock at the door two short nights ago to the ambulance. She kept her eyes on the blanket while she talked. The nurse listened, did not interrupt, wrote things on the clipboard, and when Zoe finished she said she would be back shortly and left.

Zoe looked at the wall and thought about her father driving away with the box under his arm. It was the last time she had seen him normal. Now he was gone.

The nurse came back and her face was arranged carefully.

She said the police needed to speak with her. She said she had let them know Zoe was awake. For one last time, she said she was sorry about her father again, and then she left. A woman in plainclothes came in shortly after, showed Zoe a badge, declared her name and rank, then told Zoe she was under arrest for the theft of six million, two hundred and forty thousand dollars from Divicore Technologies.

Anxiety flooded Zoe’s brain.

The officer told her that the evidence was material, that the account transfers had been traced. She told her she would remain in the hospital for a few more hours given her medical status, but that soon she would be transferred to the county jail to await processing.

Zoe got off the bed.

She did not decide to do it. Her body decided without consulting her, some animalistic instinct that said this room was now a trap, that the door was there, that movement was the only available response. She made it two steps.

The officer caught her by the arm, turned her, and had the cuff on her right wrist and the rail of the bed before Zoe fully understood what was happening. The metal was cold and specific against her skin. She pulled against it.

The officer told her to stop. She said she would hurt herself. She said it in a measured voice that suggested she had said it before, in other rooms, to other people who had just had the floor taken out from under them.

Zoe stopped pulling. She sat on the edge of the bed, hyperventilated, and looked at the cuff around her wrist.

The officer told the nurse in the doorway that she would be in the waiting room, and that the cuffs should not be removed without her present. Then they both left and the room was quiet.

The panic built in the absence of anything to do with it. The medication was still in her system, a low buffer between her and the full force of what was happening, but the panic found its way through regardless, filling the room from the floor up. Zoe sat handcuffed to a hospital bed and understood that her father was dead, Marcy was somewhere in this building without eyes, six million dollars had been taken in her name, and that she was going to jail.

She was still shaking when the door opened.

She looked up expecting the nurse or the officer. The person who came in was wearing scrubs, had their head down, and was carrying a cardboard box in both hands.

She saw the eyes first. Or the absence of them.

The nurse set the box on the table beside the bed and straightened up. His face was her father’s face, Marcy’s face, and the officer’s face, the same dark sockets, the same thin trails of dried blood, the same quality of attention that did not require eyes to be completely focused on her. He reached into the box, lifted the terrarium out, and placed it on the table in front of her.

Eight pale grey-green eyes looked at Zoe from inside the terrarium.

–

The investigators had been in Gerald Puth’s office for forty minutes. It was a real office, not a spare room with a desk in it, but a dedicated space on the second floor of his house with built-in shelving, recessed lighting, and a view of the front drive through tall narrow windows. He had built the house eight years ago and the office had been part of the original plans.

He walked them through the transactions on his monitor. The transfer had been initiated two days ago from an account with Zoe Foralden’s credentials, routed to a personal account registered in her name at a bank she had held for eleven years. The amount was six million, two hundred and forty thousand dollars. The transfer had cleared before anyone flagged it.

The older of the two investigators leaned toward the screen and then leaned back.

Gerald said he knew how it looked. He said he had been over it four times himself. He told them that she had called him the morning the transfer was discovered, that she had reported it herself, that she had recorded the call, which was either the behavior of someone with nothing to hide or someone profoundly miscalculating what hiding required. He said as an accountant she would have understood better than most people that a transfer of this size from her own credentials to her own personal account would take investigators approximately no time at all to trace. He said it made no sense. He said that more than once.

The younger investigator wrote something and asked how long Ms. Foralden had worked for Divicore.

Gerald said five years. He said she was meticulous. He said in five years she had never made an error he could find, which was a thing he could not say about anyone in her position.

The older investigator told Gerald that Ms. Foralden had filed a police report the same day, claiming she was being extorted, that the money would be returned if she complied with certain conditions. He said there was more to the situation than the transaction record reflected, that they were still assembling the full picture, and that they appreciated his time.

Gerald said of course. He walked them to the door, shook hands, and watched their car go down the long drive, turn onto the road, and disappear behind the tree line.

He went back upstairs to the office.

The report for Divicore’s board had been open on his secondary monitor since before the investigators arrived. He finished it now, the last two paragraphs coming quickly, the language precise and appropriately measured, the kind of document that demonstrated competence and distance in equal proportion. He attached the transaction records and the preliminary findings from the bank. He read it through once and made two small changes and read it again.

He sent it.

He sat back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, and thought about Zoe Foralden, who had called him in a thin frightened voice, and reported the missing money herself. Who had apparently filed a police report the same day, who was currently in a hospital somewhere in Seattle handcuffed to a bed.

His phone showed no new messages. The house was quiet around him.

Then the knock came.

He was not expecting anyone. He went down the stairs, through the wide entryway, and opened the front door.

The porch light was on. The drive was empty. The tree line at the edge of the property was dark against the sky.

On the doorstep, centered precisely on the welcome mat, sat a cardboard box.

Credit: Grant Howard

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