by Mara Webb
“You’re not with us, are you?” Quin said.
I blinked. I felt my eyes refresh as if I had been staring into space for several minutes without blinking, I could feel them aching in my head. I turned to Quin, then down to my plate. I hadn’t eaten anything, but I had pushed a few pieces of pasta back and forth as if I was warming up to lift some to my mouth.
“Sorry, I’m just thinking about these missing people. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to have so many unanswered questions. It’s just so strange. Jen’s nephew is a wizard, so it suggests that someone with stronger magic took him, right? They would have had to take him by force, and he would have been able to defend himself, unless they were too powerful.” I was mumbling as if I wanted my voice to only reach my own ears and nothing beyond.
“How many people are missing?” Quin asked. He licked a paw and started to clean behind his ear.
“I…I don’t actually know. Jen had all these clippings of news articles, it seemed like a lot of people, but I don’t have a clue. I don’t know when they went missing, how many were from Sucré, nothing helpful. Wow, I’m really diving into this headfirst with no information to back me up. I should look online or something, make some notes. Me and Jen are on a reconnaissance mission tonight and I won’t know what I’m looking for if I go in blind.”
“Maybe ask Brent? Or I could transform into a fly and go to the…hang on. Would an owl be better? No, I should morph into a horse, then walk into the center of town and create a distraction. Meanwhile, Delphi is breaking into the library. Then she will signal to—”
“Quin,” I said firmly, halting his train of thought. “I will just go upstairs and look online; Brent will also be useful. You just…sit here, in cat form, and don’t touch anything.” Although Quin was a great familiar, at times he was just so excited to be involved that he threw all logic out the window and got caught up in the design of ludicrous schemes. I grabbed my cell phone from the kitchen counter and walked over to the refrigerator with my dinner. Maybe my hunger would return later.
I opened up my recently called numbers and tapped on Brent’s name. It rang a few times before his calming voice greeted me.
“Hey baby, everything okay?” he said, softly.
“Yeah, I’m good. How’s your day going?” I replied. We both knew I wanted to cut out the small talk and get to the point.
“Hit me with it, Nora. You’re on one of your little special projects, again aren’t you? I’m asking no further questions. Just be safe, promise me.”
“I promise. It isn’t a big ask, I just wondered if you knew about how many missing people have been reported in Sucré over the last four years? Jen was looking down a few avenues that suggest that this is a national problem, but I don’t have any numbers or a starting point to research it.”
“Oh, well. Give me a second. Like I said, we have had a few meetings about it recently, especially with Cody having disappeared now too. Let me try to remember what was said,” Brent said. He fell silent for what felt like an eternity. “I think about six. I’m not sure. They have been pretty spread out. Obviously, we get reports of missing teens every now and then, but they have always turned up after a day or two. There have been six stand out cases that haven’t been resolved yet. Well, seven now if you include Cody.”
“What made them stand out?” I asked.
“Well, like I said, it’s often teenagers that get reported missing right? They head out with friends, their cell phone dies, they think nothing of it. The parents are calling the police station every twenty minutes screaming for us to find their precious baby and then their child wanders through the front door and its case closed. The six that stand out weren’t teenagers. They have all been adults with families, careers, responsibilities, and…they just don’t fit the same patterns we have for missing people.
“You always get the line from the relatives of ‘they would never just leave and not tell us anything about where they are going’ but with these six, I believe what the families are saying. There’s a strange energy around it all. Files on the missing get stored in the wrong place or are discovered shredded, the hotline we have for police info has been faulty in the weeks following every disappearance. It’s all just a bit…odd. Cody is the youngest of the missing by about fifteen years.”
He was right, it was odd.
“Do you remember any of the names or dates for the disappearances?” I asked, hopefully.
“I think there was a Jack? Or Dax? Maybe a Sandy? I haven’t looked at the files on the older cases since last year. Sorry. Before Cody, the most recent disappearance was last April. I just haven’t been tracking this as it isn’t on my case load, I wish I could be more helpful,” Brent said.
“You have been helpful, honestly. It’s enough to make a start. I love you; I’ll see you tomorrow,” I pushed the ‘end call’ button and stopped moving up the stairs. I had said the ‘L’ word to Brent just now and I was pretty sure I hadn’t said that out loud before. I clutched the phone tightly to my chest with both hands and allowed my brain to struggle through the swarm of thoughts.
Why had I hung up so fast? Was it a good thing to say that to him? I meant it, didn’t I? Should I call him back and talk about it? No, that would be awkward. Urgh. There is such a weird dance in relationships about what to say and when, it was exhausting.
I had to get started with learning more about the missing people before Jen and I broke into Joseph’s office and I had a finite amount of time before she would be here. I could deal with the fallout of my proclamation tomorrow. I took a deep breath and continued up the stairs towards my bedroom. I had tried several times to move my desk into one of the other rooms on the first floor of the house, but each time the house had moved it back. Having a magic house had its advantages, sure, but sometimes I would find myself in these passive aggressive arguments with a building and it seemed I could never win.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to put a nice big chair here in the bay window instead of this desk?” I would shout as I dragged it across the carpet, out onto the hallway and into the bedroom opposite. I would wake up the next day and the desk had been silently returned.
I sat down in my swivel chair and flipped open my laptop. I wasn’t sure what to search for first, but it made sense to try and work backwards. I typed in ‘Cody missing’ and ‘Sucré’ into the search bar and waited for the results page to populate. I was hoping that there might be an article that mentioned other missing people that were connected to Cody’s disappearance. I clicked on an article from The Sucré Sun, the town’s local paper, and found that it was the short one written by Joseph Hawk that Jen had on her table.
Sucré citizens have reported many disappearances over the last few years, and recent figures published by the Sucré Police Department reveal the worrying reality. Mr. Cody Watts (17) disappeared four days ago and his family are scrambling for help, help that our police department is unable to provide.
Cody Watts was reported missing earlier this week after hours of desperate phone calls and searches proved fruitless. He was due home from a volunteer project at the Esbat Events Hall by midafternoon, but never returned. His car has not been found. Cody is described as having short dark brown hair, approximately 5’5” tall with blue eyes and of medium build. He was last seen wearing white sneakers, denim shorts and a green and blue striped shirt.
Last year alone eleven minors and four adults were reported missing in our small town. All but two have returned, Arnold Shepherd and Sage Houghton remain lost. These incidents have quickly fallen into the ‘cold case’ pile on an officer’s desk and aren’t being actively investigated, but the families that are left behind say there is more to it.
If you, or someone you know, has any information related to the location of Cody Watts, do not hesitate to contact the Police.
The article didn’t include the names of everyone that ‘remained lost’ from Sucré, but it was a good launchpad for more research. I thought for a moment about anoth
er detail in the article that had seemed familiar, Esbat Events Hall. That was where I had found Joseph’s dead body, where he had argued with the organizer, it was the center of a lot of the action. What was so problematic about that place? Was it cursed?
I searched for the other two names provided in the article and looked for the initial reports of their disappearances. They had disappeared within a few weeks of each other and from seemingly unrelated locations. After reading through a few pages I didn’t find any further mention of the events hall, just links to fundraising pages to help the family keep looking. In the comments section on the top fundraising page for Sage there was another name mentioned.
‘I hope my contribution can help bring you closer to the truth. I will never stop looking for Heather, don’t give up on Sage either.’
The donation had been made by ‘Mr. Gilligan’, so after searching for ‘Heather Gilligan’ I found that she had disappeared the year before Sage and Arnold. Heather had children, a husband, she had booked vacations for that summer, it made no sense for her to just up and leave. I continued looking through the comments, articles and search results for missing people in Sucré until I felt confident that I had the names of everyone that Jen had been alluding too. I hadn’t linked it all to the national problem, but I now knew who was missing from my own community.
A knock at the door alerted me to Jen’s arrival. I looked at the time in the corner of my screen and realized it was eleven. I had been searching and reading for hours and now it was time for us to break into Joseph’s office and find more puzzle pieces. I felt a cold shiver rattle through my body, visions of my hands covered in blood, screams, fear. I blinked and it all went away. Was this a premonition? Whose blood had I been covered in? Another knock at the door coaxed me downstairs.
10
We pulled up outside a tall office building near the center of Sucré, it was only a few minutes from Charm Close in the car. I had never paid much attention to this building before, just acknowledged its place in the skyline. It hadn’t occurred to me that it contained two floors for the employees of The Sucré Sun. Jen had given me a brief account of her one trip into this building to meet with Joseph, how we would need to travel through the open desk area to reach his office at the far end, how sometimes the elevator didn’t work and Joseph had walked down the stairs to meet her in the foyer, and how she had been surprised that the other floors of the building were just rented out to sales companies for cold calling.
We sat in Jen’s car and I looked up at the five-story building, it seemed like a bleak place to work. The exterior walls had been covered in rough cast plaster and painted white or a dirty cream color. As the paint had aged and the plaster had flaked away the building had become a tired, crumbling mess.
“We just need to get up to the top floor,” Jen said. “I’m not entirely sure what protections have been put on this building, but Joseph had told me to ‘be very careful’ if I should ever need to come here again. I feel like he was pushing for me to come back, to read through everything he has. Maybe he knew he was in danger…”
“Why wouldn’t he have just given you everything?” I asked.
“We weren’t alone when we met in the offices, he had a younger journalist following him around that day watching how he conducts interviews with members of the public and all the follow-up involved. It might have been why he wanted to meet again, to just bring it all to me. Anyway, we can’t sit about all night trying to guess what he was planning to do. We need to get in and I would suggest we do it in the most ‘human’ way possible, I worry about the consequences of using magic here.” Jen tucked her wand into the inside pocket of her coat and pulled the keys out of the ignition.
I felt the cold chill again, adrenaline rushing through my blood forcing me to run faster, fight harder. What was this feeling? I wanted it to just be apprehension, a general anxiety about breaking the law and a fear of being caught. I didn’t want this to a be a vision of the future. I had never had a premonition before so maybe I was just catastrophizing, and everything would be fine. We both opened our doors and stepped out of the car.
The sidewalk was lit by the streetlamp a few feet in front of the car and we hurried across the paving stones and towards the entrance to the building foyer. The glass doors were locked, and we could see through to an empty desk in the darkness. There was no security guard on duty, the building was dark and empty. In a city this type of door would have a metal shutter over it at night, but here it was just one lock keeping people out. Jen pulled a small metal item out of her coat pocket and stuck the thin end into the lock.
“Never know when it will come in handy, I have all sorts in this coat,” Jen said as she twisted the tool, wriggled it and then pulled it back out again. The glass door was unlocked, she swung the door inwards and we walked inside. I half expected an alarm to ring out into the air, but the silence hung over us like a shadow. The sound of Jen pushing the door back into place felt like it could echo over miles. The squeak of the hinges, the muffled grating of the metal pins holding up the door, the clash as it slotted back against the door jam.
“We don’t really have alarms in Sucré, honestly there aren’t a lot of break-ins really. Makes it pretty easy to break in though which is the downside, but obviously it works out well for us,” Jen said with a laugh.
That didn’t make me feel relief, it filled me with terror. Joseph had told Jen to be careful. If the offices weren’t protected by traditional means, then that meant something else was guarding them. I would have preferred the alarms. Jen walked past the reception desk and over to the elevator and I followed close behind. I could see that there was a small ring around the elevator call button where a light would normally glow, but it was dark.
“The power’s off,” Jen said. “We’re going to have to take the stairs.” She turned around and pushed through a set of double doors into the stairwell. The concrete steps were lit by the emergency exit lights on the walls, a strange white glow. I felt uneasy. We climbed wordlessly as our breathing grew heavier from the exertion. We passed a huge metal number three, then a four until we finally reached floor five. The light from the streetlamps coming through the window into the fifth floor bled out into the stairwell and when Jen tried the door it opened effortlessly. No lock? I thought I saw a sudden rush of movement inside and eagerly scanned the room for life but saw nothing. Why was this door unlocked?
I looked up to the top of the door and it was kept closed by a magnetic lock system. Staff must have to scan a digital access card or something similar to get inside, but why wasn’t it locked now? Had someone forgot to turn on the locks before they left? That didn’t seem likely, these things were automated. Jen seemed unphased, in fact she smiled at me in a ‘can you believe our luck’ kind of way. I couldn’t believe our luck, I suspected that it wasn’t luck at all.
I followed her through the mass of cluttered desks and towards a door that hung slightly ajar. The metal strip across the wood read ‘Joseph Hawk’ and his window overlooked the street we had parked on. A streetlamp outside was so close it created a sort of artificial sunlight, though much dimmer. Why was his door open like this? I felt the chill again. Was someone else here?
“Jen, this isn’t right. Something isn’t right, I can feel it,” I said quietly. I backed up to the window and kept my eyes fixed on the door. Jen had closed it behind us when we entered, and I felt like it would fly open any minute and reveal some evil presence.
“I feel it too, but we will be quick. He said something in the recordings about records, right? He said he had records from Shevton and that he had some emails with agreeable theories in them. We need to find the records and take the laptop, then get out of here quickly. I don’t know what is guarding this place, but it is giving me the creeps.” Jen revealed a laptop bag that had somehow been stored inside a coat pocket and stuffed the computer into it. The charging cable had been pushed through a slot in the desk to reach the outlet on the ground. Jen dropped to her han
ds and knees to weave it loose while I looked for the records Joseph had talked about.
His desk was cluttered, there were so many papers strewn about that some had fallen onto the faded orange carpet tiles below. My intuition was telling me that he hadn’t left his desk in this state, but that someone else had been here to look through his things before we arrived. I had taken my eyes off the door. The wall that his office shared with the main desk area was made of frosted glass with a door in the center. Something was casting a shadow, a shadow that was growing larger. Whatever it was, it was approaching the office we were standing in.
“Jen,” I whispered harshly, “get up. We need to leave right now.” The premonition came back and clouded my vision, I shook my head to get it out of my mind. I needed to focus on what was happening in that moment and not get caught up in some possible future. Jen rose up onto her feet and I willed the streetlamp to die out so that we would be hidden in the dark. The roller blind over the window slowly descended down over the glass instead. I couldn’t think straight. How close were they?
I edged away from the desk and pulled at Jen who was sweeping Joseph’s papers into the laptop bag with a sweep of her arm. I pulled at her coat more forcefully and she took a big step to meet me against the wall. What was my plan? Maybe they wouldn’t see us? But they obviously knew that we were here. How could we possibly get out? What would they do if they caught us? Who could it be?
I crouched down low next to a chair near the corner of the room closest to the door. Maybe if they came in and walked forward enough, we could sneak behind them and run through the open door, but what if we were too slow or too loud? I could feel a lump in my throat, like I was trying to fight back tears. Be quiet. I watched as the handle slowly pushed down and the door swung inwards. I didn’t even dare take a breath. The blinds across the window had made it easier for us to hide here, but there might be enough light for them to see us if they looked in our direction long enough.