The trash bag was oozing something sticky, dripping nastily right onto my old robe.
I should have done this earlier, not waited until midnight, but it had been a hard day. First Katyusha with her whims, then that… Gleb. My son-in-law. The perfect son-in-law.
The dark courtyard met me with a clammy smell of damp and exhaust fumes. The only lamp over the entrance flickered feebly, snatching ugly shadows out of the darkness.
I had almost reached the dumpsters when I saw his car. Gleb’s massive black SUV wasn’t in its usual well-lit parking spot, but deep in the shadow of an old poplar, almost merging with the night.
Strange.
Instinctively I froze, clutching the stinking bag. The trunk lid was open, and Gleb himself was fussing inside, bent nearly double.
He wasn’t alone. Next to him, shifting from foot to foot, stood some girl—skinny, with matted fair hair, in a cheap tracksuit.
She glanced around nervously, and even from twenty paces I could see her gnawing the nail of her thumb.
Gleb straightened, grunting with effort. In his hands he held a large, elongated bundle tightly wrapped in several layers of black construction plastic.
With visible strain he heaved this bundle into the girl’s arms.
“Hurry up,” I heard his muffled, irritated voice, stripped of any social nicety.
Together, awkward and hurried, they began cramming that… thing… into the car. The bundle wouldn’t go, snagging on the upholstery.
In that moment I understood everything. I didn’t guess or suppose—I understood. I saw the whole picture at once, as if it were shown to me on a screen. This must have been exactly how he carried Larisa out of the house a year ago.
His first wife. The one who had “run off with another man,” leaving a short note written in Gleb’s perfect, calligraphic hand. No one ever did an analysis. Why would they? Such a charming, grief-stricken husband.
The bundle was the size of a person. And it weighed accordingly.
I backed into the sheltering shadow of the entryway. The trash bag slipped from my weakened fingers and thudded onto the wet asphalt.
Gleb whipped around at the sound.
Our eyes met for a split second. There was no surprise or fear in his gaze. Only cold, appraising fury and a silent command. A command to keep quiet.
He slammed the trunk shut hard. The clap rolled like an echo through the sleeping courtyard. The girl, without looking back, darted into the passenger seat.
The car slid soundlessly out of the yard and dissolved into the night.
I stood there, unable to move. The cold tile of the entry landing seeped through my thin slippers, but I didn’t feel it.
One single thought hammered in my head, stealing my breath. He wasn’t just hiding something. He was wiping away traces before moving on to the next one.
And the next would be my Katya.
I don’t remember how I got back up to the apartment. How I turned the key in the lock three times, how I put on the chain.
My hands shook so badly I couldn’t pour myself water. The glass slipped and shattered in the sink. I stared at the shards and felt nothing but icy, paralyzing terror.
Call the police? What would I tell them? “Hello, my son-in-law loaded something that looked like a body into his car”?
They’d take me for a madwoman. Gleb Vorontsov has an impeccable reputation. Charity, a successful business, friends in high offices.
He had thought of everything. He always thought of everything.
In the morning he called himself. A cheerful, lively, loving voice.
“Irina Petrovna, good morning! Sleep well? Katya and I want to stop by for lunch—do you mind?”
My heart skipped a beat. They were coming here. He was coming here.
“Of course, come,” I croaked, trying to keep my voice from trembling.
“Something wrong with your voice? Caught a cold? Should I bring lemons?” His tone oozed sincere, nauseating concern. A spider’s concern for a fly.
Two hours later they were at my place. Katya chattered about some nonsense, and Gleb walked into the kitchen with a bag of groceries.
“Here, decided to treat you. We’ll make a salad, roast some meat. You sit and rest, Irina Petrovna.”
He took his place at the table and began slicing vegetables. With my knife. On my cutting board. His back to me.
“Katya says you went to bed late yesterday. Didn’t sleep well?”
He didn’t turn around. The knife tapped rhythmically on the board. Tok-tok-tok. Like a hammer driving nails into a coffin lid.
“Yes, I couldn’t sleep,” I managed.
“It happens. Sometimes all kinds of nonsense crawls into your head, doesn’t it? Especially when it’s dark outside, the streetlights flicker… Feels like danger lurks around every corner.”
The knife stopped. Gleb turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder. The same cold, appraising fury as at night. Only now it was seasoned with open mockery.
“The main thing is not to mistake such fantasies for reality. Otherwise you can hurt yourself and your loved ones. Katya is a sensitive girl. She needs protecting. From everything. And from everyone.”
I tried to speak to my daughter when Gleb stepped onto the balcony “for some air.”
“Katya, listen to me…”
“Mom, don’t start,” she frowned at once. “You’re in one of your moods again. You never like Gleb.”
“That’s not it! He’s dangerous!”
“Dangerous? How? By loving me? By taking better care of you than your own son? Mom, you just can’t accept that I’m happy!”
She looked at me with hurt and annoyance. She saw nothing. She was blind.
I fell silent. Any word of mine he would twist against me. He’d make me out to be a jealous, senile old woman trying to wreck her only daughter’s happiness.
Lunch passed in a fog. I poked at the salad the killer had made and smiled. Gleb told funny stories, Katya laughed, and that laughter tolled in my head like a funeral bell.
When they were leaving, Gleb lingered in the hallway, letting Katya go first.
“Irina Petrovna, did you lose anything last night?”
He held out his hand. Lying on his palm was my trash bag—the very one I’d dropped in the night. Neatly tied.
“Seems it fell by the entrance. I picked it up. It isn’t nice to litter.”
He smiled his charming smile. And in that smile I saw a death sentence. For me. And for my daughter.
Fear is a strange thing. At first it paralyzes, and then, when it becomes a constant companion, it turns into background noise. Like rain outside the window. You get used to it.
I began to watch. I became a shadow. I listened to their conversations, noted where they drove, whom they met. My life turned into a spy novel with my daughter’s life at stake.
The turning point came last Saturday. They came for dinner, and Katya burst in, flaunting a gift. On the lapel of her coat gleamed an antique brooch in the shape of a dragonfly with emerald eyes.
“Mommy, look how beautiful! Glebushka gave it to me! Says he found it in an antique shop. Said it’s as unique as I am.”
I took her cold fingers in mine. The blood drained from my face. I knew that brooch.
A year and a half earlier, before their wedding, I’d run into Larisa at some city festival.
She was with Gleb then, glowing with happiness. And on her blouse was that very dragonfly.
I even complimented her, and she proudly said it was a family heirloom, passed down from her great-grandmother.
“Very beautiful, dear,” I said evenly, feeling everything inside me snap.
Gleb stood behind her and looked at me. He wasn’t smiling. He simply looked, and his gaze read: “Yes. It’s hers. And what will you do to me?”
He didn’t just kill. He reveled in the game. He set pieces on the board and moved them, drunk on his power and my helplessness.
That evening, when I closed the door behind them, something in me changed. The fear evaporated. Only a ringing, dead emptiness remained—and a single thought.
Enough.
Enough of being a victim. Enough of trying to get through to Katya. She wouldn’t hear. I had to act myself. I would act by his methods.
I am a former chemistry teacher. Thirty years’ experience. I know precision, calculation, patience. I know how to work with reagents. And I remember all his habits.
He’s obsessed with his car. Every week, on Sunday morning, he personally washes it at a garage complex on the edge of town. Himself.
He trusts no one. Vacuums the interior, wipes every panel. Pristine cleanliness.
The perfect place to plant evidence.
But not just any evidence. The kind that would blow his perfect world to pieces.
All night I sat at my old laptop. I looked for Larisa’s parents. Searching their surname turned up nothing—they seemed to have vanished into thin air.
But I didn’t give up. I remembered how that day Larisa mentioned a cousin, a veterinarian from their hometown near Tver, with the uncommon surname Kravchuk.
I started searching for veterinary clinics in Tver Oblast. Three hours later I found one. “Dr. Kravchuk.”
I called, introduced myself as an employee of the pension fund. He resisted for a long time, but when I said a person’s life was at stake, he gave in and dictated the father’s number.
“Hello,” answered a tired male voice.
“Good afternoon, Semyon Arkadyevich. My name is Irina Petrovna. I’m Gleb Vorontsov’s mother-in-law. His new wife’s.”
A heavy silence hung on the line.
“We need to talk about your daughter. I think I know what happened to her.”
Semyon Arkadyevich came the next day. A tall, stooped old man with eyes washed dull by grief. We sat in my kitchen. He’d brought a small jewelry box.
“This is all we have left. Her childhood drawings, a couple of pieces of jewelry…”
He took out a tiny silver earring shaped like a drop. The same as in Larisa’s photograph.
“Here’s the plan,” I said, my voice hard as steel. “On Sunday Gleb will go to the car wash. You need to be there too.”
Sunday morning was gray and raw. I sat in Semyon Arkadyevich’s old car across the road from the garage complex.
In my hands—the earring wrapped in a kerchief. My hands weren’t trembling. I was absolutely calm.
At ten o’clock, right on schedule, Gleb’s black SUV pulled up.
“Time,” I said.
The old man nodded, got out, and walked slowly toward the gate. A minute later I heard a dull thud and the screech of metal.
Gleb shot out of his bay as if scalded. Semyon Arkadyevich’s car had “accidentally” grazed the neighboring garage door. An argument started. But that wasn’t enough.
In the heat of the quarrel, Semyon Arkadyevich suddenly clutched his heart, groaned, and began to sink slowly to the ground.
Gleb froze for a second, but he couldn’t simply leave a “dying” old man in front of everyone. He rushed to him, shouted, called for help. Exactly what we needed.
I had no more than a minute.
I darted to his car. The door wasn’t locked—he was right there, after all. I opened the trunk. The smell of chemicals and cleanliness. He had scrubbed everything to a shine.
I shoved the earring deep into the gap between the seat and the trim. Closed the trunk. And slipped back into our car a second before Gleb, having handed the old man to the guard who’d run up, rushed to call an ambulance.
An hour later, already at home, Semyon Arkadyevich called the police and reported that he had received an anonymous letter saying that evidence in his missing daughter’s case should be sought in her husband’s car.
We were sitting at my place when the call came. It was Katya. She was sobbing.
“Mom, Gleb… they arrested him! Right at the car wash! They say… they say they found…”
She couldn’t finish.
When they brought him to the station, he was calm and mocking. But his confidence evaporated when the experts found the earring.
Then, after treating the interior with reagents, they discovered wiped traces of Larisa’s blood. The cherry on top was the fair-haired girl.
“Do you know this woman?” the investigator asked, showing a photo. “Angelina Volskaya. Disappeared three days ago. Her phone was last active near your home.
We believe you used her to cover up another crime and then killed her as an unnecessary witness.”
It was that very girl from the courtyard.
That evening Katya sat in my kitchen wrapped in a blanket. She stared at one spot and was silent. I just sat beside her and held her hand.
“Mom… that brooch…”
“I know, darling. I know.”
At the trial Gleb looked only at me. There was no mockery in his eyes anymore. Only primal, impotent hatred. He understood. He understood everything.
He thought he was playing a game, but he didn’t know he was playing against a retired chemistry teacher.
My daughter was safe. Justice—odd as it was—prevailed. I washed my hands, rinsing away the invisible traces of my little war.
And for the first time in a year, I slept peacefully.
Six months passed. Gleb got life. At the trial other episodes surfaced that no one had known about. He turned out to be a monster far more terrifying than I had imagined.
Katya moved in with me. The first months were the hardest. She hardly spoke, cried a lot. Went to a therapist. She threw the dragonfly brooch into the river that very evening.
One late evening she came into the kitchen where I was checking school notebooks—I’d gone back to tutoring to keep my hands and head busy.
“Mom,” she said softly. “Forgive me.”
I looked up at her.
“Forgive me for not believing you. I was such a fool, so blind… He… he spoke so beautifully. I thought that was love.”
I stood, went over, and hugged her. She was thin, almost weightless.
“Love doesn’t blind, Katyusha. On the contrary, it makes you see better. You’re not to blame for anything.”
We stood like that for a long time, hugging. And I realized the crack between us had finally begun to heal.
In May, Semyon Arkadyevich came to us. He brought a big bouquet of peonies.
“They found Larisa’s body, Irina Petrovna. Gleb showed the place. We buried her… properly. Now my wife and I have somewhere to go.”
We sat and drank tea. He no longer looked like a broken old man. There was meaning back in his eyes.
“Thank you,” he said before leaving. “You didn’t just save your daughter. You brought us peace, too.”
I said nothing. What peace could there be.
I didn’t become a hero. I felt no triumph. I did what I had to. Like a chemist mixing two dangerous reagents to neutralize a third, even more deadly one.
It was simply necessity. Cold calculation.
Sometimes at night I wake to the sound of a car driving away.
And it seems again that I’m standing in the yard with a bag of trash, and from the darkness cold, furious eyes are staring at me.
But then I go to Katya’s room and watch her sleep. And I understand that I did everything right.
I didn’t bring back the dead. But I didn’t let him take the living.
I close the door. I go to the kitchen. I pour a glass of water. And morning comes. An ordinary morning. And that is its greatest value.