I rang the doorbellandthen waited. There was no car in the drivewayandno lights spilling from inside. When no answer came, I looked through the windows but saw nothing but vacant rooms inside.
I knocked.
"Will?" My voice sliced through the silence, hopeful yet wary. I listened, heartbeat drumming in my ears. Nothing.
I walked to the back and grabbed the sliding door that was still left unlocked. I walked inside.
“Will? It’s FBI Agent Thomas. I need to talk to you. Are you home?”
The air felt stagnant, heavy with the absence of life. The void answered back—no footsteps, no breaths, just the whisper of dust settling into the grooves of time-worn floorboards. It didn’t look like Will had been back here after being released. Everything looked just like when I was here last.
"Okay," I muttered, steeling myself. Adrenaline surged, visceral and sharp. "Let’s take a look."
I stepped over the threshold, the weight of the unseen pressing close. It was as though the house had swallowed Angela whole, erasing her existence with a gulp of shadows and silence. But I was here to make it spit out the truth, however long it had been biding its time in the darkness.
I moved swiftly, my eyes raking over the mundane details of a life interrupted—of Will staying there for three years before his arrest. Three years after his wife had died in this very place. How did you do that? How did you cope with that? I once lost a dog very suddenly when I was younger, and I could barely be in myown apartment after that. But Will had lived herefor three whole years. And then he had been arrested. One morning a couple of months ago, they had come for him, and no one had lived here since. I noticed the scatter of magazines on the coffee table, a half-empty mug of cold coffee crowning its ceramic surface.
The stairs loomed before me, wooden and unassuming. I could almost see her there—Angela, poised for a descent she'd never complete. The banister seemed to shiver with the ghost of her touch. My gaze crawled upward, tracing the path of her fall, and I shook the image from my mind.
Room by room, I scoured, flipping cushions and rifling through drawers—an intruder searching for the jagged piece of this puzzle. But each space yielded nothing, pristine to an unsettling degree. The kids had gone to live with their grandmother when their mother died. Yet their rooms still stood the same—like mausoleums over a time lost. The stairs leading me back down had been cleaned; you couldn’t see the blood that was in the pictures in the case files anymore. The handprint on the railing was gone, too. It was like it had never happened.
Yet it had. And it creeped me out as I walked down the stairs, grabbing the railing as if I was afraid to suffer the same fate.
What made her fall? Was she drunk? On drugs?
The case files told me she usually had great balance. She had even been a ballerina as a child. But the toxicology report also told me that she had no drugs in her system.
Could it be just an accident? Was I wrong about my strange feeling that it wasn’t?
Something caught my eye: the door leading to the screened-in back porch.
I opened the sliding door and stepped out. The screen was ripped in places, and the area mainly served as a place for them to store their patio furniture.
"Stay sharp; look for anything abnormal," I murmured to myself.
And just like that, something in the corner caught my eye.
"Hello, what have we here?" The words were a whisper, a ghost's breath.
Moving closer, the porch surrendered its prize.
"What on earth…?"
The revelation was sharp, a shard of glass in my mind. This changed everything. The narrative, the suspect, the motive—they were all intertwined in this macabre story.
I swallowed hard, the taste of betrayal bitter on my tongue. Trust, once broken, turned the world into an alien landscape. Here, beneath the earth, surrounded by whispers of the past, I stood on the precipice of a staggering truth.
And it was making my blood run cold.
Chapter 28
My heart hammeredagainst my ribs, thudding with a sense of urgency and fear as I slammed the heavy car door shut behind me. The sound echoed through the deserted driveway, a sharp contrast to the eerie silence of the darkened house in front of me.
With trembling hands, I fumbled for the keys and inserted them into the ignition, the familiar roar of the engine providing a comforting sense of control in this chaotic moment. My grip tightened on the worn steering wheel as I took deep, shaky breaths, trying to calm the coiling dread in my stomach. Every nerve was on edge as I prepared to make my escape from this place filled with grim revelations and haunting memories.
"Drive," I muttered to myself, slamming my foot onto the gas pedal with fierce determination.
The tires screeched against the asphalt, their grip biting into the ground like a cornered animal fighting for survival. Despite my desperate attempts to outrun it, I could still feel the residue of terror clinging to my skin like an invisible shroud that refused to let go.
