Mina Murray’s Journal

The cops have the information about @henryirving and the account is gone. Nothing too horrible has happened in the last 24 hours so that’s nice *screams*. Man, you think you’ll just play an innocent murder mystery game in the hopes of finding your true crime podcast cohost and girlfriend’s mysteriously disappeared brother and things BLOW UP IN YOUR FACE WHO EVER COULD HAVE IMAGINED IT IS SHOCKING.

Um anyway I’m not the least stressed out I’ve ever been ← ALERT: understatement for the purposes of drama!

[Later]

Lucy has decided that sex is the best way to distract ourselves from the fact that we might’ve gotten passed a note by a psychopathic killer and it’s a pretty good strategy.

But of course my restless brain won’t shut off so I spent the last few hours before bed last night trying to figure out this fucking clue with the recording of the woman leaving the voicemail while waiting for her Uber (until Lucy snatched my laptop and prescribed more sex :D).

In addition to being hot as fuck, though, Lucy’s brilliant. When I woke up this morning, she was sitting in bed, wearing headphones, and listening to the message from the clue again.

“I think there’s something in the background,” she said when she saw I was awake. “I didn’t notice it much before because I was just listening from the computer, but with headphones…listen.”

And when I paid attention, I could hear that she was right. In the background, beneath the sounds of traffic, the girl’s brassy voice, and her slightly intoxicated breathing, was what sounded like tones. Trust Lucy to find the music in anything <3

So Luce ran it through the program Arthur uses when we’re recording Shadowcast, only in reverse, stripping out the main noises instead of the background noise. What we were left with when she was done, was someone playing notes on the piano. Which…I can’t lie, that really creeped me out. Was it actually on the voicemail, like it was happening near her? Or was it layered in the sound file itself? Lucy thought the latter, since the layers of sound were easy to separate, or something. The notes went—so Lucy told me:

ACEFGFDBCEACDAFBEEGAFCFDACGEECFDA and so on, just the notes A, C, E, D, G, B, and F, in every permutation, repeating.

But the music itself wasn’t really a tune; just notes. So, then, because I’m me, I started messing with the letters to make words:

CAFE BAG DEAD FADE DEAF GAFFE GAG BEAD FEED ACE BEE DAD BEGGED FACE FED CEDE BEFF CAD CAB…

The ones that seemed relevant were “dead” (obviously), “cab” (since the girl got into an Uber), “bead” maybe (because Mardi Gras)…but we didn’t want to get dinged again, so we went back over our screenshots of all the clues.

And when we were looking back at the second clue, where we learned Jay Ingram had money on him when he was found, we also saw the note scrawled on a napkin that was in his pocket. At the time, we’d only paid attention to deciphering the note itself, since it unlocked Jay’s phone. Now, though, Lucy noticed the icon in the corner of the napkin, partially obscured by blood. An ace of hearts, like on a playing card. ACE.

From there, we got to ACE CAFÉ, which is a bar on Magazine Street, not far from the Lafayette Cemetery where Jay’s body was left. Also not far from where the girl must have gotten picked up by Uber, since she said it was at 7^th, and the only cross-street that has a neutral ground people walk on near there would be St. Charles Ave.

Now we just have to wait until Arthur’s done with work and we can try “Ace Café” as the answer.

Hmmm, whatever shall we do until then… ;)

SpidersAndFlies wrote: I have rethought the wisdom of a podcast, for I fear my message cannot be communicated via a purely aural medium. Souls glow and pulse; shadows darken them and threat diminishes or expands them. How could I possibly tell the story of a SOUL? This has grown bigger than I expected, my friend Arthur. I feel…connected to something for the first time. Something has…expanded me, made me capacious in a realm hitherto untouched. Once I was a child and the night was frightening—the flap of a crow’s wing, the scream of a bat. Now the darkness falls over me like something made of my own material. Something friendly and elating. I am growing. I am expanding. I have touched the vast inside and the vast outside and made of them equivalency.