I woke up with a start to the sound of my phone ringing, and groped out to answer it. My head was bleary—I hadn’t slept well, and had woken drenched in a thin film of sweat after having nightmares about going up into that attic and finding something nameless and terrible in the dark up there. I groped for my cell, which was buzzing loudly against the wood of my bedside table, and took the call without even checking who was phoning me at this hour.
“Hello?” I asked blearily.
“Hey!” Scott replied brightly. “How are you?”
“Uh, fine until you woke me up,” I teased, his upbeat tone giving me reason to wake up completely. “What’s up?”
“You know how I gave you the number of that forensics guy?”
“Yeah, I called him, but he said—”
“Forget him,” Scott cut across me. “I have a friend coming into town, best in the business.”
“Oh yeah?” I pulled myself upright and swung my legs out of bed, getting up to pace the room. It had never much been a habit of mine before, but in the last couple of months, things seemed to have taken a turn for the much more stressful and I appreciated the chance to work out some of my nervous energy.
“Yeah, Elijah, and he’s in town for a conference,” he went on, and I could hear the crackling thrill in his voice. “He’s my old mentor, actually.”
“Ah, no wonder you think he’s the best!”
“Well, it’s not just me who thinks that,” he assured me. “Everyone does. And I already spoke to him—he says he’s happy come around and have a look at the photos and the kitchen.”
“Are you serious?” I came to a standstill, throwing my other hand in the air. “That’s amazing! Thank you!”
“So you doubly owe me a drink now,” he teased. “He said he’ll be down when he’s in town for a conference, which is next week. I’ve given him your number.”
“Scott, you’re awesome,” I sighed, and I could practically hear him cocking an eyebrow at me.
“Moan, we’ve known each other since college and I don’t think I’ve ever heard you use that tone before. Just what is going on with you and that Jazz guy?”
“I don’t know.” I waved my hand, not keen to get into that when we’d just had a long-needed break. “It’s not important, anyway.”
“I’m going to get the full story out of you one of these days,” he warned, and I grinned to myself. I had missed just bantering with him like this.
“Sure you are, keep telling yourself that.”
He let out a little snort of amusement, and finally turned back to the subject at hand. “So, can I tell him that we’re all systems go on that then?” He sounded distracted—he was probably out for a smoke break and needed to get back to the office.
“Do it. And thank you, Scott. I appreciate this so much.”
“No problem.” He dropped the sarcastic front for a second, and I could hear the warmth in his voice as he spoke. “I’ll talk to you soon, yeah?”
“See you soon,” I agreed, and he hung up the phone. I let out a small sigh and leaned back against the wall. Finally, things were moving again.
A few days later, I found myself in Jazz’s kitchen watching as the best man in the business investigated the floor as though it contained the secrets of the universe.
Elijah had arrived bang on time, as we’d agreed, and had practically shoved the two of us out of the way to get to the kitchen; he explained that he’d heard everything about our case so far and was fascinated with figuring out what had happened. He was treating this like some kind of mystery game, and while I was glad he was here, part of me felt as though he wasn’t taking this seriously and it was bugging me. I pulled a face at Jazz behind his back, and Jazz mirrored my expression. This all seemed just a little too good to be true, and I couldn’t shake that feeling no matter how hard I tried.
Scott hovered around, watching Elijah work with baited breath, as though he expected him at any moment to crack the case and declare the whole thing under control. I wondered how long they’d worked together—and whether or not it had been something more than work. The way Scott was looking at him, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that they were more old flames than old colleagues.
“So, when exactly did you say this all went down?” Elijah suddenly jerked upright, making us all jump. We had all been lingering in complete silence while he worked, as though one wrong move or word would render the whole thing useless. His voice sounded oddly loud against the quiet around us.
“Uh, a couple of months ago now.” Jazz screwed up his face. “April. The twentieth, I think?”
“Right.” Elijah nodded, and returned to his work, ducking down below the counter and grabbing another one of his tools from the box. Scott crouched down opposite him and watched as he worked—I was just glad Ella was out of here for the time being, glad that she didn’t have to see how serious this had all become in her absence.
“Is there anything there?” Jazz asked, tiptoeing around the edge of the kitchen floor so as not to disturb anything he had laid out there.
“Nothing so far.” Elijah shook his head, and my stomach dropped—another pointless dead end we had ended up lost down. I sighed.
“Except…” Elijah began again, and Jazz’s head jerked up. “What size shoe are you?”
“Uh, a twelve,” he replied, leaning over to see what he was looking at. Elijah glanced up at him, and a flicker of comprehension seemed to pass over his face.
“Then I think we might have something here,” he muttered. Jazz and I exchanged another look, but this time, it was filled with renewed hope.
“What is it?” Jazz asked keenly, getting down on his haunches to peer at the floor as though he might suddenly see something there he’d missed before.
“Scott, can you pass me the flashlight, please? The one with the…?”
Before he could finish what he was saying, Scott was fumbling in his case to pull out the tool he needed. He handed him a small silver flashlight, and Elijah leaned in close to the ground. I watched from a distance, worrying that if I got too close I might blow the whole deal.
Elijah’s head snapped up, and he trailed the flashlight across the floor and up over the counter above him. Suddenly, I saw it—a set of footprints, larger than mine or Ella’s or even Jazz’s, leading across the counter and out of the window above the stove. All of us followed the flashlight’s path as one, and when it reached the window, Elijah looked over at Jazz.
“A couple of months ago, right?”
Jazz nodded.
“The footprints lead outside, but I doubt we’ll find much there because of the rain and weather washing them away,” Elijah continued, his words coming quickly as though he could hardly wait to get them out of his mouth.
“So what do we do?” Jazz asked.
“First, document this,” Elijah ordered. “Photograph the footsteps under the flashlight. Make sure we have a record of all of this going down, okay?”
“Done.” Jazz pulled his phone from his pocket and began to snap away. After a minute or so, he glanced at the pictures and frowned, apparently satisfied. He looked back up at Elijah. “What now?”
“I say we follow these footsteps as far as we can.”
The flashlight led us outside, to the window, where a large footprint was almost intact across the frame.
“Looks like whoever it was jumped from here,” Scott remarked, his eyes sliding over to Elijah as he spoke, as though he hoped that his observations would earn him points in the eyes of his ex-mentor.
“Yeah, you’re right.” Elijah nodded absently, and I could practically feel the internal fist-pump Scott was pulling off at his reaction.
“And if we follow the direction of the footprints…” He wandered forward, pointing the flashlight at the ground but coming up with nothing. “Then they end up…”
He trailed off as he found himself face-to-face with Paul and Mary’s house. He glanced over his shoulder at Jazz, who hurried to catch up.
“Who lives here?” He asked, gesturing up at the house towering above us.
“An old couple, but I already went around to visit them.” Jazz shook his head. “There’s no way they had anything to do with this. Neither of them are agile enough to climb out of the window that fast.”
“I don’t think it’s them you should be worried about,” Elijah pointed the flashlight at the wall. I sucked in a sharp, shocked breath when I saw what he was referring to—a footprint, large and undeniable and matching the one back in the kitchen. And it was flat against the outside wall of the house—heading upwards.
“What the fuck…?” Jazz muttered to himself as he approached. He stepped around the house, and glanced inside—the lights were off, and the place looked empty. I shot a furtive look around, and found the four of us alone out here.
Elijah tilted the flashlight up and followed the footsteps upwards—the beam splayed and dissolved at a certain height, but there was no question that they led to the attic. But we’d already tried up there—and we didn’t find a thing.
“I need to get up there,” Jazz murmured to himself—and before I knew it, he was hoisting himself up on the windowsills, digging his fingers into the slats on the side of the house and dragging his body up towards the roof.
“Jesus, Jazz!” I yelled after him, then immediately shut my mouth—the last thing I wanted was him plunging to his death as he scaled the building. My heart beat hard in my throat as I watched him climb, and then, to my great relief, he reached the roof and came to a stop.
“Can you toss the flashlight up?” Jazz called down, sticking his head over the roof—my feet tingled with vertigo as I considered how far up he was, how much damage he would do if he fell. Elijah tossed the light up to him in one fell swoop, and Jazz caught in gracefully out of the air—he switched it on, and shined it down at his feet.
“Yeah, the footsteps carry on up here,” he yelled, and disappeared deeper on to the roof. I hoped to God that Mary and Paul really were out, and that no one would catch Jazz investigating without their permission. That was the last thing we needed. Scott and I exchanged a look—one that asked whether this was the kind of shit he pulled on the regular—and I shrugged. Yeah, pretty much.
“Anything?” I called up to him, and there was a pause before he replied. In that moment of silence, I found my brain filling with the possibilities of what could have happened—but as soon as his voice came drifting down again, I let out a breath I didn’t realize I had been holding.
“Uh, I don’t know,” he replied. “The footsteps just stop at this particular set of shingles, and I don’t…”
He trailed off, and I heard a scrabbling from on the roof.
“What the fuck is he doing?” Scott muttered, dancing from foot to foot and shooting looks over his shoulder as though he expected one of the neighbors to turn up and call the cops any second. To be honest, even though that was a concern, my mind was on other things—like whatever it was Jazz had found to distract his attention like that.
“The shingles!” Jazz’s voice suddenly broke the silence. “There’s a patch here, and they’re fake! They pull right off!”
“Where do they lead?” Elijah called up. He seemed totally calm and in-control, as though he did this kind of shit all the time—well, you sign up for a case like this and you end up in weird situations, I guess.
“Into the attic!”
My stomach dropped to my feet. I knew what that meant. It meant that the figure we saw moving in the attic that day, it wasn’t some crazy monster that Ella and I giggled over stories about all night long. It wasn’t something abstract. It was real and here and Jazz was probably going to confront it as these thoughts raced through my head, and there was nothing I could do to stop him, nothing I could do to keep him safe—
I heard a muffled thump as Jazz dropped into the attic, and I held my breath. Please, let him make it down okay. I closed my eyes and squeezed my fists together tight until I heard his voice coming from the far end of the roof once more.
“I’m out!” he called, and some more footsteps echoed down through the silence of the evening. “Hey, guys, can you come around this side?”
We scurried to do as he asked—Scott looked like he just wanted out of there, where Elijah seemed keen to see what happened next.
As we reached the opposite side of the building, we were greeted by Jazz—he was almost on the ground, carefully sliding down a large rope that appeared to be attached to the roof somehow. I cocked my head at him.
“Where did that come from…?”
“It was just up there when I arrived.” He shook his head, an incredulous expression on his face.
“Someone’s been planning this for a long time,” I muttered, mostly to myself—I just needed to hear the words, to know that I wasn’t losing my mind. That this crime-thriller storyline was actually happening to me.
“What was in the attic?” Elijah asked eagerly, and Jazz began to stride back to the house.
“Not much. Nothing that I thought was particularly out of place for an attic. Some old furniture and stuff.”
His face was liked thunder, and I knew that wasn’t the end of it. I hurried to keep up with him as he headed back into the house, Elijah and Scott close on my tale.
“What else did you find?” I demanded as we entered through the kitchen door. Jazz reached into his pocket, and spread out a piece of paper on the table in front of us. We crowded around, squinting and twisting our heads about to get a better look at the smudged writing on the crumpled scrap.
I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel a more doomed sensation than the one I had when Jazz confirmed the existence of the attic—but I was wrong. My stomach felt as though it had been hollowed out completely, leaving me empty and raw and aching inside. The words danced before my eyes, as though my brain was trying to convince me that I hadn’t seen them at all, that I was crazy and that was all it was.
Jazz and Ella, the letter began, scrawled in a messy, spidery script. I miss you. I’m looking forward to making a family with you. See you soon.
Even though there were only a handful of words in front of me, it felt as though all the pieces were finally slotting into place. Whoever had written this letter, that person had been the one to break into the house—the one to try and take Ella. The one she had been fleeing from. Cold prickled on my scalp, and I looked up at Jazz. He was pale, paler than I’d ever seen him, and his face was drawn and tight as though he hadn’t slept for days.
“I think you guys should go.” He turned to Elijah and Scott. “Thank you for all your help, I really appreciate it.”
“Not at all.” Elijah waved his hand. “But I think you should go to the police if you can, this is no—”
“I appreciate the help,” Jazz repeated, and there was a tension to his voice that none of us could ignore. Elijah bowed his head, gathered his stuff, and Scott and he disappeared outside for a smoke, leaving the two of us alone together again.
The paper was lying on the kitchen table like some kind of grenade, waiting to go off and take everything that Jazz had worked so hard for with it. I stared at him, trying to put myself in his shoes-wondering how I’d feel if that was my daughter, my family, my life this psychopath was trying to tear apart.
“Why would he leave the letter there?” Jazz shook his head. “Like he knew I was going to come in and find it?”
“Maybe that’s what he wanted?” I suggested, reaching out to touch the scrap tentatively as though it might explode upon contact with my fingers. Jazz snatched it up before I could do so.
“I need this for evidence,” he muttered, stuffing it in his pocket. “Need to get everything in place for when I call the cops.”
I glanced at my watch, trying to distract myself from what had just happened. “Shit, I need to pick up Ella.”
“No, you go home,” Jazz instructed, and there was a forcefulness in his tone that told me not to argue. I nodded and grabbed my keys, and paused in the door.
“If you need anything…” I began awkwardly, and Jazz shot me a look, his expression softening briefly.
“I know. Now go. We need to figure out what we’re going to do next.”