by Mark Lukens
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I told Stan everything. I started from the beginning. I started with Michelle leaving the restaurant and the elderly woman who claimed to have seen Michelle leave with a man who looked a lot like me. I also told Stan that the elderly woman’s husband said she had some kind of dementia. I told him about talking to the cops, and then to the two detectives the next morning. I told him about waking up and thinking someone was in the house, and how I was sure that things in my house had been moved around. I told him about Kendra at the nursing home where Michelle had worked, and how Kendra had told me that Michelle had quit three weeks ago.
“Three weeks ago?” Stan said.
“Yeah. I was shocked. It means that for the last three weeks before she left me in that restaurant she had been pretending to go to work. And the detectives talked to Kendra. Needless to say, they also found that a little suspicious. But the worst part is that Kendra said Michelle was scared of me.”
“Scared of you? Why?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. We never fought. The day we went to the restaurant, we were getting along great. But obviously something was wrong. The only thing I can figure out is that she’d caught me sleepwalking. Or I had done something while sleepwalking. Something so bad she didn’t want to tell me about it.”
“Maybe,” Stan said.
“But it doesn’t seem like Michelle. I mean, if there was something wrong, she would have told me. She would have told me that I’d been sleepwalking, or that I had scared her. I don’t think she would have pretended the whole time. If she was really scared of me, really that scared, then she would have left me in the middle of the night, or the next day while I was at work. She had plenty of time to pack up and leave.”
Stan nodded. “You said you found something.”
“Yeah. After I talked to Kendra and then the detectives, I looked around through Michelle’s stuff again. I don’t know how to describe it, but it felt like I was missing something, some clue. It kept nagging at me. I looked through her clothes in the closet and her drawers again, going through all the pockets. And then I found something stuffed down in one of her boots.”
“What?”
“It’s in the office.”
Stan followed me to the office. I opened the drawer and pulled out the bank deposit receipts and the notecards.
He took the rubber band off of the stack of papers and sat down in my office chair, looking at the papers under the glow of my desk lamp on the shelf above my computer monitor. He didn’t say anything as he studied the notecards and bank statements carefully. Then he looked at me and let out a whistle. “That’s a lot of money you guys saved up.”
“Those deposits are to a different bank, not where I put my checks from work. It’s a joint account, and I don’t remember ever opening it.”
He cocked his head a little. “You mean you never knew about this money?”
“No.”
“You never deposited any of this money?”
“No. Michelle must have been depositing the money over the last few years.”
“Her checks from work?”
“No. Those went into our checking account.”
“What’s this money from?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know.”
Stan thought about it for a few seconds. “That’s a lot of money. Could she have had a side business or something? Something you didn’t know about?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see how.”
“Maybe she was getting money from her family or something.”
“Her parents are dead, and she’s not close to anyone in her family that I know of. Not even her sister. They didn’t get along. Her number is disconnected and I can’t find her anywhere online.”
“A rich uncle?”
“I don’t know. What about those numbers? You know what those could be?”
“Account numbers?”
“If they are, they don’t match that bank account.” I thought for just a second. “You think they could be account numbers to other bank accounts?”
Stan shook his head. “I don’t know. Man, that would be crazy if there are other bank accounts with this kind of money in them.”
“What else could those numbers be?” I asked.
“Passwords? I don’t know. They’re too long to be dates, unless it’s two dates put together.” He counted one of the series of numbers then shook his head. “No, too short for two dates put together.”
“Maybe these numbers on these cards are the same numbers written on the walls in that house across the street,” I said.
Stan’s eyes lit up. He turned to my computer and pulled up the footage he had just downloaded, playing it back.
I got right behind him as he watched the footage. He had zoomed in on some numbers when he’d been filming. He paused the footage and checked the numbers on the notecards.
“Do they match?” I asked.
“Yeah, these do.”
He started the film again, watching as it panned to the next series of numbers. He hit pause again and checked the notecards.
“What about those numbers?”
He shook his head. “I can’t find them. But some of these numbers match these notecards, and some don’t.”
He let the video keep playing, checking more of the numbers, writing down the ones that matched on the spiral notebook I had given to him. When he was done, he studied the numbers for a few minutes.
“Anything?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Like I said, they could be passwords, or some kind of code. But look at this one.” He pointed to one of the lines of numbers. “See anything familiar about this one?”
I stared at the line of ten numbers he was pointing at.
“I think part of it’s a date,” Stan said. “See these last two numbers end in this year. And the four numbers before it: Zero, four, one, one.” He looked at me. “April eleventh.”
“That’s just a few days away.” I looked back down at the numbers. “What about the four numbers in front of that?”
He shook his head just a little. “One, six, three, zero.” He shrugged. “A time?”
“A time?”
“Yeah, maybe military time. Sixteen thirty would be four thirty in the afternoon.”
“Four thirty on April eleventh. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know,” Stan said. “Let’s check the footage from inside your house.” He looked up from the numbers on the notecards. He pulled up the footage on my computer from the cameras he had installed in my house, watching it for a few minutes.
“What is it?” I asked. I could tell that he’d just noticed something.
“Look at this. When you came back from the house across the street, you came in here and turned your computer on, typing something on here before you went back to bed.”
I nodded. “But we can’t see the computer screen from this camera. Maybe I should either turn the computer monitor towards the camera tonight or maybe change the camera’s angle, if we can.”
He didn’t answer. He watched the footage of me sitting at the desk, clicking away at the keys. I was only there for a few minutes. Then I clicked a few times on the mouse and got up, walking toward the door to leave the office.
“You weren’t sleepwalking very long,” Stan said. “You got up. You went across the street to that house. You didn’t bring anything with you, none of your wife’s clothes or a rope for a noose. You were only there for about forty-five minutes. You came back to your house and went here into your office. You used your mouse, then typed something. Then you used your mouse again. And then you went back to bed.”
Yes, I was aware of all of those things.
“You did something on the computer,” Stan said, like he was talking to himself now. He clicked out of the video footage and pulled up the main computer screen with the icons on it. He started opening programs, looking
through Word files.
“There isn’t a lot on here,” Stan muttered as he searched.
“I don’t use the computer a lot.”
He opened up the internet and went to the bookmarked pages, opening my Facebook page. “You don’t have any of your stuff password protected.”
“I let the computer save my passwords for me.”
“That’s not really a good idea.”
“Well, it’s just me and Michelle here, so I didn’t really think it was anything to worry about.”
“Hackers.”
“I don’t go on Facebook much,” I told him defensively.
He didn’t answer, scrolling through my timeline.
I watched over his shoulder, looking at posts from me over the last few months, a lot of it was just stuff I had shared from other friends. He went to my list of friends and opened up Michelle’s page. It was similar to mine, a few cat pictures and videos shared, nothing really exciting.
“You only have eighteen friends?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought I had a lot more than that.” I saw a few guys from work on my list of friends (not Stan because he didn’t believe in Facebook, always warning us that Big Brother was watching us through platforms like that). I didn’t really have any family, a few distant relatives who were on Facebook about as much as I was.
“What about Twitter?” Stan asked.
“No. I’ve never been on there.”
“Instagram? Snapchat? Any others?”
“No,” I told him.
“Email?” he said as he opened my email. “Your password?” He got out of the chair so I could sit down and punch it in. “You mind if I look at the last emails you’ve sent?” he asked from right behind me.
“No,” I said, and we changed places again. “I don’t remember sending anything recently except at work.”
Stan looked through the email I used for work, looking through everything I’d sent. “Any other emails?” he asked.
“I sent one to Michelle’s email address. She never uses it, but I thought maybe she might look at it if she’d left me.” I pulled it up for him and opened it so he could read it. The email I had sent her was a little embarrassing, begging her to come back to me.
He shook his head. “You did something on this computer.” He clicked on a few more icons, opening up areas of my computer I’d never seen before. “Maybe you deleted something.” But he didn’t seem to find what he was looking for.
“What about this email address?” he asked. “Zach20202@gomail?”
I stared at the computer and shook my head. “I don’t know that email.”
“This isn’t your email address?” he asked, suddenly excited.
“No. I’ve got an email address I use, similar to the gmail account that Michelle has. But mostly I use my work email. I’ve never seen that one before.”
Stan smiled at me. “Let’s open it up.” His words died as he stared at the screen.
“What’s wrong?”
“This one’s password protected.”
I shrugged. “Like I said, I’ve never seen that email address before.”
Stan looked at the lines of numbers he’d written down in the spiral notebook. “Maybe one of these is the password. One of them except the date and time.” He started entering the lines of numbers one by one.
The fifth line of numbers opened the email.
It was a site I’d never seen before.
“There aren’t any inbox emails,” he said. Then he clicked on the Sent folder. A line of emails popped up. “You sent a lot of emails,” he said. “And one of them was last night around three thirty a.m.”
“Open it,” I told him.
He looked at me like he was making sure I really wanted to do this. Then he looked back at the computer and opened the email. I stared at the email for a moment, not sure what I was looking at.
“It’s just more of those strings of numbers,” Stan said. “Strings of numbers like on these notecards.”
“And like on the walls in the house across the street.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Stan wanted to stay the night with me. He insisted on it. He wanted to be there when I woke up from sleepwalking. He said the cameras he had installed were good, but it would be better if someone could follow me with a video camera. And he was worried that I was right about someone watching me, and maybe someone entering my house. He reminded me about the flash of light between my curtains two nights ago, the first night I had videotaped myself.
“Maybe someone’s trying to set this up to look like you’ve done something to Michelle.”
“To frame me? But how? And why?”
“I don’t know. That’s what we need to figure out.” He got up, ready to go home and get a change of clothes for tomorrow.
Part of me was happy Stan was staying the night, but another part of me wasn’t too crazy about the idea. I worried that I might not act like myself while I was sleeping. I still had a concern that I was somehow dangerous while sleepwalking, that the reason Michelle had fled without taking anything with her was because I’d done something so terrible while sleepwalking, something that had frightened her so badly.
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” I told him.
“Why not?”
I told him about my fears of doing something bad while walking in my sleep.
“If it gets too bad, I’ll wake you up.”
“What if you can’t wake me up?”
He didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. “I’ll have a bottle of water with me. I’ll splash you with it.”
Finally, I relented. I nodded.
He was about to go home to get a change of clothes for work tomorrow, intending on leaving right from my house to work.
Right before he went out the door, I stopped him. “Stan, thanks. I mean it. I think a lot of people would have run out of here screaming after seeing the things you’ve already seen.”
“No problem. This is actually kind of fun.”
For you, maybe. But I didn’t say it.
*
While Stan was gone, I ordered a couple of pizzas, getting them delivered—I didn’t feel like going anywhere. As soon as the pizza got there, I ate a slice and made some tea, swearing off the coffee for the rest of the night.
Thirty minutes later Stan was back with his change of clothes, his own small video camera so I could keep mine in my bedroom, and a laptop computer that he said was “clean,” not connected to him in any way.
“I want to download all of the footage onto my laptop and send it to another site, somewhere to keep the stuff safe,” he said.
I nodded that it was okay with me.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” he said. “I’ll try to stay awake all night.”
“What about work tomorrow?”
“If I feel like shit, then I’ll just call in.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding. As his manager, I knew I shouldn’t be going along with that, but I needed his help. “Listen, earlier, there was something I forgot to tell you about.”
He frowned at me.
“I’m not holding out on you, I just forgot.”
“What is it?”
I hesitated. It was something I’d never told anyone about besides Michelle. But if Stan was going to help me, then he needed to know everything. “Remember when I told you about the doctor that gave me the sleeping pills?”
He nodded.
“She’s a psychiatrist. For the last two years I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist.”
Stan just stared at me.
“I’m not crazy,” I said quickly. “It’s just that I’ve suffered with anxiety and depression in my life. It started right after my parents died in a car crash.”
He nodded like that made sense to him.
“I was twenty-one years old when my parents died, my second year in college. I was devastated. I couldn’t concentrate on my schoolwork. Nothing seemed to matter anymore. I sa
w a doctor back then, and he helped a lot. He prescribed some anti-anxiety and depression medicine, but all it did was kind of take the edge off of things. What really helped was meeting Michelle. We started dating, and suddenly it felt like there was something good in life, something to live for.”
“So you’ve been taking those medications all these years?”
I saw the doubt in Stan’s eyes, the suspicion that all of this might be my mental disorders and not the conspiracy he hoped it was.
“No. I got off of them a year after me and Michelle were together. But about two years ago the panic attacks started coming back. And the depression.”
“When you became a manager,” Stan said. “Maybe it was the stress. I know Steve would drive me crazy.” He clamped his mouth shut as if he had offended me somehow by using the word crazy.
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. I struggled with it for a few months. Michelle was worried about me. She told me about a friend of hers who saw a therapist, Dr. Valentine. So I went to see her. She was nice, not really much into therapy, but she prescribed some medications for me. Not the stuff I had taken before, but something new.”
“Did it help?”
I shrugged. “I guess. I had my ups and downs. About a year ago I had some bouts of insomnia, basically crawling into work after hardly sleeping all night. So Dr. Valentine prescribed me a sleep-aid to help me sleep.”
“Maybe your sleepwalking is a side effect from the sleep-aids you’ve been taking. I’ve heard about people sleepwalking after taking sleep-aids.”
I could still see the disappointment in Stan’s eyes, the realization that much of this might not be some evil conspiracy, but a side effect from a medication. But he wasn’t running for the door just yet.
“Maybe,” I said. “But after that first night when I woke up with my clothes on in bed, I stopped taking the sleep-aids. I stopped taking all the medication.”
He nodded. “That’s good. But maybe there’s some kind of aftereffect, like a long-term effect until all the medication gets out of your system.”