I never found the pictures with Matthew in the background. In going through my files, I discovered it wasn’t just the prints that were gone, but the files too. The text message picture from Candace was also missing; everything I had of Matthew had somehow been erased. Then there was the little detail of my car battery mysteriously coming back to life. So many strange things all centered around my blackout, and I wasn’t the only one passing out bizarrely.

After school, I drove over to Hot Coffee to talk with Alexis and Candace about my blackout and see if they had any further insights to share.

“Did you ever get to talk to Fiona’s mother?” Alexis asked after she finished taking a customer’s order.

Candace and Eli were at the bar making a mixture of hot and blended drinks, with a large group of customers watching them work.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t tell you about it earlier; I’ve been… sick.”

“Well, what did she say?”

“She said this Matthew guy was harmless and him being in the photos was coincidental. I felt like she was brushing me off, but there wasn’t anything I could do.”

“How does she seem? I wanted to stop by and check on her.”

“Calm,” I said. “She said the police are taking care of things and she’s just waiting for word. She’s supposed to call me when she hears anything.”

“I want to know too,” Alexis exclaimed.

“I know; I told her that. I’ll pass along anything she tells me.”

Alexis had to pause our conversation as another customer ambled up to the register. I sat at the barstool and watched her interaction. She had such a welcoming way about her, a disarming disposition that always made others want to smile. It reminded me of why I’d liked her so much when we were kids—that, and the fact she grew more beautiful every year, the approachable kind of beauty.

A minute later, she came back to where I was sitting, but then quickly turned to the sound of an alarm going off and brewed a new urn of coffee.

“You told me about a blackout you had some weeks back,” I began while she finished setting up the new urn of coffee to brew. “What do you remember just before it happened?”

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Alexis said, as she came back to the counter. “We were out at Black Star, sitting around a bonfire. I had one hard cider. Fiona and Candace had one or two each—”

“I had one or two what?” Candace asked, walking over to us while Eli made a beeline for the office.

“We were talking about the night in the canyon when we each blacked out,” Alexis said.

“I thought we were never going to talk about that again?”

“Sean was asking about it?”

“Why?”

“Because I think I had something similar,” I said, causing the deer-in-headlights stare from both girls.

“What’s this now?” Candace asked.

“Something happened to me a few nights ago and I still can’t explain what. At least you guys had been drinking. I hadn’t drunk anything. And that Matthew guy has to be behind it somehow.”

“What makes you say that?” Alexis asked.

“Because all the pictures I showed you with him in the background are gone.”

“What do you mean, they’re gone?” Candace asked.

“Exactly what I said. Gone. Prints, files, everything,” I said. “One minute I remember being in the parking lot of Fiona’s apartment, and the next thing I know, I’m throwing up on my bedroom floor.”

“Been there,” Candace said with a nod.

“That does sound like what happened to us,” Alexis said. “Fiona said she’d blacked out too, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Another thing that’s strange is that Mallory’s been gone for a while too. I have a class with her. And she hasn’t come into the shop recently either.”

“I wouldn’t exactly complain about that,” Candace said. She moved like she was going to hop up on the counter, but then stopped herself. “Maybe she choked on her chai and died.”

“No; seriously, isn’t it weird she’s been gone too? And do you remember how she reacted when she saw Matthew in here that one day?”

“Oh, yeah. Okay, that was a little weird,” Candace said.

“What was weird?” I asked. “What happened?”

Another customer came in and Alexis left to meet the family at the register, though Candace made no motion to run off and help.

“She saw him sitting at the bar talking with Fiona and acted like I’d never seen her before—nice and cordial. No snide comments. No rude remarks. She paid for her drink and the drinks of her friends then left without saying a word.”

“And you saw her notice him?” I asked.

“Yeah; she definitely noticed Matthew. It was almost like she knew him too, but they certainly weren’t on speaking terms.”

I took in this new information, more suspicious of this guy than ever. Had Mallory supposedly “run off” too? Her father did own the coffee shop, but from what Alexis had said, he rarely ever came in. He wasn’t exactly the hands-on kind of owner, so the opportunity to ask him personally didn’t seem likely. If it turned out Fiona and Mallory had disappeared on or about the same time, then I’d believe all fingers would be pointing back to Matthew.