Free Erased by Jordan Marshall Page A

cottage- looked like the lair of a serial killer. It was impossible to wrap her head around what she was seeing. How could someone have done this to her home? She’d just been there a few hours ago. No one could have totally emptied her house and destroyed it in that amount of time. It didn’t seem possible.
    And the furniture… why would they change the furniture? The senselessness of it was terrifying.
    Tears blinded her as Sara stumbled through rest of the house and found it to be the same. The furnishings were either gone or destroyed. The master bedroom was in chaos and the only bed was an old mattress lying on the floor. The closet doors were missing, but Sara found them lying on the ground in the backyard next to Bree’s playhouse, which was turned on its side.
    Bree’s room looked like someone had emptied a trashcan on the floor. The only thing intact was the pink paint on the walls. Sara and Scott had done that when Bree was four. The room’s previous color had been a nice neutral tan, a color Sara knew would be appropriate for either a boy or girl. At the time, they hadn’t known what sex the baby was going to be. They wanted it to be a surprise.
    Then Bree came along, and very soon began to assert her will. By the time she was four, Bree knew very well that she wanted a pink room. She more or less demanded it, and Sara was happy to oblige. She would have done anything to make Bree happy.
    Sara felt nauseous as she glanced at the discarded refuse, at the hole knocked in the wall and the broken closet door. Who would have done such a thing? What sort of deranged mind would do that to someone’s home?
    She called out to Scott in a quaking voice, though she knew he wouldn’t answer. Scott and Bree were both gone. Her family was gone. Sara leaned up against the wall. She dropped her head into her hands and wept. She felt her world crumbling, and along with it, her sanity. Bree was real. Scott was real. She told herself this. It had to be true. The house, the bedroom… these things proved that her past life had been real… but what had happened? What had become of it all? Of her family?
    Sara recalled the voice on the phone: Your family is gone, Sara. You’ll never see them again unless you come to us. She got a sickening feeling as she realized she might have made a terrible mistake. The man on the phone really had taken her family. What if she had put them in danger by running away?
    Sara thought about going back, about begging them to let her family go. What would they do? The man on the phone had already framed her for murder. If she went back, he would probably kill her. Maybe he would even kill Scott and Bree, too. Her stomach lurched at the thought.
    “No,” she murmured. She couldn’t give up like that. Sara couldn’t live without her family. She needed them, and they needed her. She couldn’t live without them. Sara would kill herself if she lost them. But even if she did go back to the city, how could she find them?
    She wouldn’t have to, she realized. They would find her. They were looking for her. All she’d have to do was show herself. But what then? What if she turned herself over to the killers? Would that save her family?
    Sara couldn’t even guess. But she knew one thing for certain. She had to go back to where it had all begun. She had to go back to the city. That was where she could find them, and that would be the first step in understanding what had happened to her and where her family had gone.
     
    Sara wandered back to the car in a stupor. It was hard to make sense of things. You’re a wanted terrorist. You’ve been living in a dream.
    In the back of her head, Sara heard the man on the phone, and she trembled as she realized he’d been telling the truth. His words twisted like a knife in her gut. It made her wonder if everything else the man had said was true. Was it possible? Could they really have taken her life like that? Could they have somehow erased the old Sara, and