by A J Rivers
“Why would he do that? What was the point of faking his own death?” Sam asks.
“Because nobody hides from a dead man,” I say. My eyes go wide. A memory snaps like a bolt of lightning behind my eyes, nearly making my knees buckle. “We need to go to my house.”
“Right now?” he asks.
“Yes. We need to go now,” I tell him.
As soon as Sam’s squad car pulls up in front of my house, I tumble out and run around the back of the house. Going into the small shed, I grab the axe my father used to use for firewood off the wall and run inside.
“What are you doing with that?” Sam asks.
“There’s a reason Jonah left here without me,” I say as I make my way through the house toward the attic stairs. “You talked about the storm that night. I love storms. I love to sit by the window and watch them. Always have.”
“I know you do,” he says.
“I didn’t watch that one. I remember hearing it, but I couldn’t see it. There was nowhere to look out and see the rain.”
“How is that?” he asks. “Every room in this house has windows.”
“Not every room,” I say and sprint up to the attic.
The lightbulb glows yellow down on the wooden floor. Shadows are moving on the wall from the boxes and furniture that have gradually filled the space. I find the spot on the wall where a hulking armoire used to sit. My hands grip the handle of the axe, rage creeping up my body and flowing into my hands. Rage at my uncle for what he did to my mother. Rage at my mother’s death and never seeing her face again. Rage at being followed and watched. Rage at Catch Me.
Rage at myself for allowing myself to be played like this.
But no more.
I let out a cry and swing it hard. The blade bites into the wall. I yank it back with every bit of strength I can gather and slam it again into the attic wall.
“Emma, what are you doing?” Sam demands, scrambling up the steps into the attic. “Put the axe down.”
“No!” I snap. “Enough secrets! Enough hiding. Enough of all of it. Pam told us there was a room up here.”
I wrench the blade out again, sending drywall and chips of the wallpaper scattering, and swirling dust into my eyes and mouth. I cover my cough and swing again, digging deeper. “I said there wasn’t. That I remember this place from when I was a little girl. I would remember a room.”
Another swing causes a large section of the wallpaper to come down and the wall to crack and break apart. One more reveals a door.
“Holy shit,” Sam gasps behind me. “Not a room that was hidden.”
“I couldn’t see the storm that night because Mama brought me up here. We hid in this room. I didn’t remember it from when I was younger because there wasn’t anything to remember about it. And then I blocked out that night. I blocked out being terrified because I knew somebody was trying to get into the house and hurt us. I was terrified when Dad ran out of the house after him. I didn’t know who it was. They never told me about Jonah. For obvious reasons now. Dad came home, and I heard the police come back. He said something about not seeing anything. He just heard the crash. I had no idea what he was talking about. Mama kept me in the bedroom after we came down from here. My grandparents showed up, and I spent the rest of the evening with my grandmother. I had no idea what happened. Only that there was a lot of crying that night,” I told him. “A big armoire used to sit against this wall. I always thought it was there to store my grandma’s old coats, not to hide something. That’s how I knew where to look. They must have boarded it up sometime after that night.”
“But why would they board up this room?” Sam asks. “What would be the point in sealing it up? They believed your uncle was dead, but that doesn’t mean they have to get rid of the hiding spot. Especially considering every other house on this street has this extra room. It’s not like it would stand out.”
I look at the door and the bits of wall surrounding it. Touching my fingertips to the drywall and plaster used to seal up the room, I realize sections of it are a different color than the rest.
“The room was sealed up twice,” I point out. “Look. Some of this is older than others. Somebody went into the room after it was already closed up.”
“Let’s find out what they were after,” he says, taking the axe from my hand.
I step back while Sam chips away at the rest of the wall to reveal the door completely. He sets the axe down, and I step up to the door, resting my hand on the knob. I have no idea what to expect on the other side. My heart shakes in my chest. My mind screams at me to just seal it back up and walk away. They sealed the room for a reason, and I shouldn’t disturb it. But I can’t. I’ve lived my entire life with gaps in my past. Black stretches where I should have days. Question marks where I should have memories. My mother’s death and my father’s disappearance made me feel like I would never fill those spaces. Now I have the chance to. I can’t turn my back on it. Whatever is inside is another piece toward understanding it all.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“It’s like they took his entire life and shoved it in here,” I muse. “They literally sealed him up. Made him disappear.”
Sam and I have stepped into the small room off the attic. We’re staring at shelves and boxes of… memorabilia, for lack of a better word. Not for a sports team or a treasured alma mater. But for a life. The room overflows with pictures, trophies, and clothing. Childhood trinkets are piled alongside photographs. There’s even a pair of boots leaned in the corner like they’re waiting to be put on.
“It looks like they took everything that belonged to him and put it in here,” Sam agrees.
“And everything my grandparents had of him,” I point out. “These look like pictures that would have been hanging on the wall and pages of albums. They took all of the reminders that Jonah existed and put them in here, then sealed it up and walked away like he never existed.”
“But why would they keep it?” Sam asks. “They thought he was dead. After everything he did, I can understand not wanting to think about him. I can even understand them not wanting you to know he ever existed. Not knowing what he did to your mother, and that he tried to come after you. Maybe even more than once. They would want to protect you by not letting you know. But if it was that important to them, if they really wanted to obliterate him from history, why keep a room full of reminders of him? It’s almost like a shrine.”
“It’s not a shrine,” I reply. “Everything was just put in here. It’s not on display. No one was ever able to access it.”
“I still don’t understand,” he says. “Why keep it at all?”
“Because he was their child,” I say. “Sam, this wasn’t my mother and father’s house. This was my grandparents’ house. They knew what he did and understood why he needed to be removed from their family’s lives, but that didn’t change that they had two sons. My grandmother carried two babies inside her. She gave birth to two boys. She raised them and loved them. She watched them become men. A mother doesn’t just stop loving her child even if she has to excise him from her daily life. He was still her son.”
“Are you seriously sympathizing with him?”
“No. I’m sympathizing with parents who had to live with knowing one son betrayed the other so badly. Who had to mourn his death in silence. They believed he was dead. They marked the end of his life by pretending it never happened. And don’t forget, he and my father are identical twins. So, every time they looked at my father’s face, they saw Jonah, too.”
On the other side of the room, I notice a plain white box that looks like boxes my dad used to store stuff. I take off the top, using my phone light to look inside. It’s filled with file folders. Sam comes up beside me as I take one out and open it.
“What are those?” he asks.
“I think they’re the reason somebody unsealed the sealed room,” I tell him. He glances over my shoulder, and I show him the file. “This is my father’s handwriting.” He takes the folder from m
e, and I grab out another few. “These all have my father’s handwriting in them. These are his records.”
“Why would he put them in here?” Sam asks.
“Look at the dates. These cover years. Most of them are from before the wreck. But then, look, he didn’t write the date on these.”
I pull a newspaper clipping out of the box. “It’s from six months before he disappeared.” I open another of the folders, and a vice tightens around my heart. “Sam…”
He looks up from the file he’s holding, and I show him the picture in my hand.
“That’s Natalia,” he says.
I nod. “This whole file is about her death.”
“It seems your father was doing a lot of looking into your future,” he tells me.
“What do you mean?” I ask. He shows me the folder in his hands so I can read it. Across the top of the page, in my father’s handwriting, is a phrase: “What is he doing?” I read out loud. “He knew about Leviathan.”
“At least he had his suspicions,” Sam nods. “There’s nothing in here that’s specific. It doesn’t directly talk about Leviathan or refer to Jonah as Lotan. But there are notes about accidents and disasters he believes were actually crimes. It seems he figured out Jonah wasn’t dead.”
“But why would he take all this and put it in here? Why would he go to the effort of opening up a sealed room to hide files in it?” I ask.
“He didn’t want anyone else to find them?” Sam suggests. “He knew there could be danger and didn’t want anyone else to get their hands on this information, but also couldn’t just destroy it.”
“Derrick mentioned my father came here just a little while before he disappeared. He said he was clearing some stuff out of the house and putting it in the storage so the house could be rented. We’ve gone to the storage unit, so we know he actually did that. But what if he wasn’t just putting stuff into the storage unit. What if he was hiding these, too?”
“Because he knew he wouldn’t be looking at them any time soon,” Sam says. “Either he knew he would be back for them, or that one day you would find them. By this point, he knew Jonah was alive. This room wasn’t about pretending his brother never existed anymore. One day it was all going to come out. He just had to keep it safe until then.”
“This would explain what he was looking for when he broke into the house. He just didn’t have time to find it,” I say. I put the files back into the box and put the lid on before lifting it and heading out of the room. “I want to go through these more carefully. Maybe Dad was onto something that can help us.”
My phone starts ringing in my pocket when I’m halfway down the attic stairs. I let it ring as I lug the box into the living room. By the time I’ve set the box down on the living room table, the ringing stops. I take out my phone and look at the screen.
“Who was it?” Sam asks.
“It was Dean,” I frown, concern immediately building in my chest. “He stayed at the hospital with Greg to try to get as much information as he could. Hope everything’s okay.”
Sam opens the box and starts taking the files out as I redial Dean’s number.
“Hey,” I say when he answers. “I’m sorry I missed your call. Is everything okay?”
“Martin put up a new video,” he tells me with no introduction.
“A new video?” I ask.
“Greg wanted to watch the videos again to see if he could pull out any information he missed the first time. When I opened the blog again, there was a new video posted. You might want to check it out.”
“Hold on; I’ll watch it right now. I just need to grab my computer.”
Sam and I sit side-by-side on the couch as I access the blog. Just like Dean said, a new video was posted just a couple of hours ago. Holding my phone to my ear with one hand, I use the other to start the video. Unlike in the other videos, Martin is outside. Wind whips around him as he walks.
“All will come to pass soon. Lotan knows I have failed him. I did all I could. But I will make atonement. I will make it right.”
The video jostles and then drops as if the camera fell or Martin put it down on the ground and then goes silent.
“What happened? I can’t hear anything,” I say.
“The audio got turned off,” Dean explains.
“On purpose?”
“I don’t think so. I think the intention was to turn the camera off. Keep watching,” he tells me.
There’s not much to see. The camera angle shows the ground at the bottom edge of the screen and the sky at the top. The side goes dark for a few moments, like Martin stepped in front of it, then brightened again. A few seconds later, something drops in front of the camera. At first, it doesn’t register what I’m looking at. Then it sinks in.
“That’s the blade of a scalpel,” I say.
“And it’s bloody,” Sam adds.
The camera moves again, and for just a second, the audio comes back, then the screen goes dark, and the video ends.
“We need to find him,” I say.
“How?” Dean asks. “He doesn’t say where he is.”
“Hold on,” I say. I scan back a few seconds and watch the end of the video again. It takes two more times going through it before I’m sure. “I know where he is.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Care to explain to me how you knew there was a body here?”
“Lovely to speak to you again, too, Detective Legends,” I say.
The screen of the video call is fairly dark, but there’s just enough illumination for me to see the scowl on the angry detective’s face.
“I’m not in the mood for your bullshit, Miss Griffin,” he says through gritted teeth.
“Agent Griffin,” I correct him. Again.
He somehow contorts his face even further and continues. “The last I heard from you and Sheriff Johnson, the two of you were leavin’ in the middle of our investigation. Then on the news, I saw you got yourself tangled up in another murder in Feathered Nest. I thought you were their problem, but now I get dragged away from my night off ‘cause of a tip about someone in trouble. And lo and behold, who is behind that call, but you? So, I wanna know again. How did you know there was going to be a body here?”
“I already explained it to the officers I spoke to,” I fire back.
“My jurisdiction, my case. So, explain it to me,” he snaps.
“Is that Emma?” I hear a much more pleasant voice ask from off-camera.
“Yes,” Legends growls. The screen shifts. Detective Mayfield’s face appears on my phone.
“Hi, Emma,” he smiles.
“Hi,” I nod. “I see you’re still yoked to the delightful Detective Legends. Haven’t figured out how to get out of that yet?”
The younger detective opts to remain diplomatic and doesn’t feed into my negativity toward his partner, opting instead to mutter a small laugh and smile.
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” he asks. “We just got your tip that we’d find somebody out here who needed help.”
He doesn’t need help. There’s nothing anyone can do for Martin now. The hospital sheet around his slashed neck assured that. But someone needed to find him sooner than the hours it would take to drive down there.
I give Detective Mayfield a brief recounting of the events. When I finish, he stares back at me with widened eyes that don’t seem to belong to a man who’s handled many murders in his career. But that’s what makes him good at what he does. Even after everything he’s seen and all the evil he’s witnessed, Mayfield still manages to have feelings and sympathy. It’s what keeps him caring and stops him from getting complacent.
“Well, at first glance, it looks like Martin was feeling guilty about failing the leader of his cult and killed himself to make up for it,” he says.
“Martin didn’t kill himself,” I say.
“And you know that so clearly why?” Detective Legends demands, snatching the phone back from his younger partner.
“It doesn
’t fit,” I offer.
“Evidently, you didn’t watch the video close enough,” he says. “Martin here said he was gonna atone for what he did. For his failures.”
“Killing himself wouldn’t be an atonement,” I point out. “That wouldn’t do any good. The man he was referring to, Lotan, doesn’t care if his followers live or die. It would mean nothing to him to have someone kill themselves because of him. I wouldn’t put it past him to have a collection. But that’s not the point. The point is, I did watch the video close enough to notice the bits of sand splash up against the lens of the camera when the scalpel dropped. And in the last couple seconds of audio that came back on, I heard the train whistle.”
“And you honestly want me to believe that was enough for you to figure out he was at the train station?” Legends growls.
“Detective, you’re getting dangerously close to accusing me of murder again,” I say, forcing my voice to remain as calm as possible.
“If the scalpel fits,” he says sarcastically.
“I really don’t want to have to remind you that a man is dead, not three feet away from you,” I say. “Try to show a little bit of professionalism and respect.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Legends growls. “If you would stop getting in the way of everything, it would be better for everybody.”
“I’m several hundred miles away from you,” I point out. “If that makes me in your way, you seriously need to reevaluate your sense of personal space.”
The phone goes back into Detective Mayfield’s hand.
“How did you figure out it was the train station?” he asks. “Those details are suggestive, but not enough to narrow in on a place like this.”
