by A. R. Licht
Still, what was Abby doing at the store? She should have been home in bed, resting. Thank all that is good that everything came back in the clear. But, what about next time?
If whoever it was that pushed Abby knew enough to find her there while she shopped, and was that brazen in a public place where she could have been caught, there’s no telling what else they know or could be capable of.
Kate no longer felt safe. What if she was being followed right now?
That would implicate Phil.
“Do you think you could take me back to my car, please?” Kate said, the dread of causing more harm to those she loves a weight as heavy as the ocean in the Mariana Trench.
“Your car? I was going to drive you straight home. We can get your car later if you want.”
“I’d hate to leave it there overnight.”
“It will be fine, besides I don’t think you’re good to drive,” Phil said, still giving her those side-long glances.
She could tell he was dead set on taking her home. The streetlights flash by outside in a staccato beat along the interstate. The exit he should have taken to the bar comes and goes, her eyes following it longingly.
“I don’t want to put you in jeopardy,” Kate said, knowing this would raise questions she was unwilling to answer.
“That’s why I’m driving, so you won’t.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“I’m taking you home, Kate. End of discussion. I thought you’d grown up.”
“I have grown up,” She said defensively.
The rest of the car ride was spent in silence, the flash of headlights and taillights smears and smudges as she cried silently. What if her actions had killed Abby’s unborn child? Her niece. She could never have forgiven herself.
Phil pulled into a parking space in front of her apartment building and shut off the car. Surprised, she looked over at him. He took the keys out of the ignition and held them in his lap. Staring straight ahead he said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but I know Brian said some harsh things to you back at the hospital. You know how new parents are... protective. Perhaps overly-protective. He’ll calm down later and feel bad for what he said.”
Kate was grateful for this kindness, but he wasn’t aware of the full story. He might not be so nice if he knew. “Thanks.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m alright. I’m worried about Abby.” And her job, and the people who did this. And Phil.
“Are you regretting anything we did tonight?” He said and swallowed hard.
“No. Not at all,” She said.
He smiled a little, “I’m glad to hear you say that.”
He got out and walked around the car, opening the door for her. She took his offered hand and together they rode the elevator up to her apartment.
She hesitated at the door, key in the lock, knowing this was a bad idea for two reasons. In that ten second span where Phil became very still, she realized that right now she didn’t want to be alone. She craved the attention, missed having a man in her life, particularly Phil. There was always the chance that this would not work out and it may ruin their future friendship, bringing it to rubble.
It was a chance she wanted to take.
The key turned, the pins shifted, she led him into her space. A place he had not seen or even been a part of its' shaping. She watched him take in her choices in decor and the photographs that lined the main hall.
It was as if he was drinking in all of the time they spent apart, reading her life story in one swift page-through so that he could see all that he had missed. It always gave her a thrill to do this in other people’s homes, and she wondered what was going through his mind.
“Make yourself at home,” she said, leaving him to poke about.
She changed clothes, freshened up, and returned to find him on her sofa looking through her photo album.
“You spent some time in Paris.”
She sat next to him and saw the photographs he was referring to. A spontaneous trip during spring break of her final year in college. A few of the girls had the idea and she’d been excited to be invited.
“It was only a week. We had a blast,” She said, smiling at the memory.
“I don’t see any photos of us.”
She reached for the album but he pulled it away so she couldn’t take it. He thumbed through the rest as she sat quietly, waiting for him to say something more.
“It’s okay, you know. I just... didn’t think...”
Kate swallowed, terrified that anything she said would ruin the tentative restart. “My heart was broken. It was the only way I could move on.”
“I broke your heart,” he said, the pain adding a gravel to his voice.
He set the album on the coffee table and faced her. Taking both her hands in his, he met her gaze evenly.
She looked away from the intensity of his stare, then back again.
“I’m sorry. I thought I was doing you a favor,” he said.
“Our six months together was the happiest I’ve been.”
“You were so young, I felt old in comparison. I really felt like I was stealing your youth. I knew you had goals, dreams, aspirations. Brian thought I would hold you back.”
“Brian?”
Phil looked embarrassed, “I talked to him about it, voicing my concerns. He agreed that you were young and immature. That you would need time to grow as a person and learn who you are, what you want out of life. Sometimes being attached and in a serious relationship so early causes it to burn out quicker. I didn’t want that for us.”
“So, you chose to break it off. I wasn't that young... not that much younger than I am now. I could make decisions for myself.”
“I thought we’d still be good friends.”
“How could we be close when it hurt too much to even think of your name?”
Phil gave her hands a light squeeze before letting them go. He stood, seeming unable to decide what to do next.
“I don’t want you to go,” she said, maybe a little too forceful.
His jaw clenched, “The one thing I didn’t want to do was lose you. I was an idiot to think that you wouldn’t be hurt. I truly thought I would be doing something you would later appreciate.” He turned toward her, “I’m so sorry, Kate.”
She stood and slid her arms around him, the feel of his shirt soft and warm with his body heat. She lay her head onto his chest, and it felt like a revolution around the sun had past before he responded by wrapping his arms around her. She closed her eyes, breathing in his familiar scent.
“Then stay with me,” she said.
Not wanting to jump back in too quickly, they agreed not to do more than sleep in the same bed. She lay on her side, his body against hers, his arm draped over her. She was almost afraid to fall asleep and wake up to find him gone, or that she had imagined the whole thing, but after a while she drifted off.
Abby’s swollen face, the smell of jet fuel burning, the sound of an automatic rifle. The final crack of gunfire jerked her awake.
The clock reads three-ten a.m. when she finally gives up on sleep and gets out of bed. She leaves Phil in peaceful slumber and pads out to the living room. She starts up a pot of coffee, downs a bottle of water and a few B-Vitamins in the hopes of staving off a hangover. Out of habit, she checks the email inbox and is surprised to find something waiting that isn’t the usual advert.
This time her mysterious sender has attached a photograph of her. It was taken at the Speedy Chef diner, in Alkin, shot from the outside. She could make out the edge of a windshield and the window of the building through which she sat at a table, idly checking her phone.
It gave her chills to think that they were there, outside, watching her. They asked her to meet up, but did not show themselves.
Why this game? Why even alert her to the fact that they were creepily messing with her? She saved the photo to the desktop, unsure of what to do with it. There were no words in the email, only the picture. W
as it a message?
She stood, popping the vertebra in her lower back, dims the lights before moving to the window. Pushing the curtain aside, the night beyond dark. Down below, the ocean waves made mountains that broke into white capped explosions on the rocks. The moon illuminates the blue grey shimmer, but does little else to break up the void between.
The city lights on either side have lost their brilliance, most of the town asleep. She dims the lights in the apartment and steps out onto the balcony. The night air assaults her, the wind cutting through her sweater. She stands at the edge, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
A spark below lights up, orange glow. It disappears for a moment, and then falls to the ground where it dies out.
Someone is down there, smoking a cigarette. Someone in the dark, calmly standing there at three-something in the morning. She suddenly remembers the gossip hounds from the lobby talking about a man hanging around, watching the building.
Were they watching her?
She backs slowly inside, closing all of the curtains before bringing the lights back up to full-brightness.
She stands, hand over her heart, feeling it beat. Thoughts swirling, fear rising, it all seems so crazy.
Then, in a rush, she moves to the drawer where the bag of flash drives is tapped to the back. She lets out a cry when she discovers they are gone. They might have fallen, the tape might have given out. She pulls the drawer free, reaches in, feels around. She runs to the kitchen and digs through the miscellaneous draw, finds the flashlight and runs back.
Even with the light, she can see that the bag is gone.
Phil turns over in the bed but resumes his slumber. She quietly closes the door behind her, and hurries to her laptop. She pulls up the iCloud account she last used, her own, only to find that someone has emptied it. All of the files are gone.
Chapter 20
Essex, Maryland - April 21st
It’s all gone. All of it. The footage, the hard drives, everything. Even the ones stored on her computer. She had felt paranoid enough to make copies, but that had been just in case Jack became aware that she had the footage and demanded that she return it. Now, she couldn’t be more glad that she’d made those physical copies.
But if they had come here to her apartment, could they also have gone to her sister’s house and taken what she’d placed there too?
Then she gasped, the realization that the attack on Abby might have had a two-fold motive behind it striking her like an unforeseen microburst wind. Not only had they wanted her to stop digging- willing to even cause a miscarriage- but they had entered her secured apartment and took any evidence they thought she might have, doing it in a way that she didn’t catch it immediately.
She kept thinking of them as ‘they.’ Who were they? The FBI? The government? Some secret group?
Now she was starting to sound like a fringe conspiracy theorist. Someone that society frowns upon because they read into things that aren’t there, making false claims because of a possible mental illness. Generally the claims are illogical, paranoid, fear-mongering, ridiculous.
She had to question if she fell into this group, or if the evidence truly pointed to a real hoax. If she were mentally unstable, she decided that she would not be questioning if it were true or not. Also, there were very real things taking place, documented things.
So, she could cross fringe conspiracy off the list and focus on how to prove that it is a hoax.
Because she is certain that the crisis event was a hoax, she needed to understand the motivation behind it, as well as how much of the event had been real. Had anyone actually been shot, had there been real gunmen? How deep does it go?
The motivation part seemed easy. Having watched back the interviews several times already, the first thing that stuck out in her mind was the way many of the victims’ families immediately talked about gun control laws. She heard others talk on the other networks about how to ensure that grenades were not viable, how to prevent just anyone from being able to purchase them off the streets.
So, laws concerning guns was being touted yet again, this was not a new concern. The horrendous shooting at a women’s hospital was sure to capture the attention of the entire nation, expanding out as far as the other side of the Atlantic. People would be affected, they would mourn and grieve, feeling outrage at the brutality of what had been done.
These same people would take up the cause, spearheading it to make sure it would pass through congress and be taken seriously. Of course this was something that then led back to fringe conspiracy, because why would anyone want to control who had access to guns beyond what was already set in place? That would mean changing constitutional rights and to what end?
Kate tried to imagine who would want such laws altered. Was it possible that the group
responsible for the hoax could be parents that actually endured the loss of their children to a real shooting event? This could make sense, because short of coping with a tragic loss is not having your voice heard. What better way is there than creating something so horrific that you don’t need your voice to be heard when emotions are involved, letting the public make your case for you.
She could understand and sympathize with that, but then the issue becomes, how does one finance something so complicated with so many moving parts? And where do the police and FBI fit in?
When she was in high school, there would be reenactments of the consequences of drunk driving. Oftentimes a car that had been in a wreck, its body damaged and crushed, would be put on display while a couple of classmates acted out a script. When the reenactment was over, a song would play that ripped out your heart because of the sadness it caused. Kate remembered crying after seeing the first staged reenactment. The song chosen at the end to this day is associated to a tragedy that never actually happened.
This is how that felt, only on a grander scale. How could they keep so many people quiet so as not to ruin what had been accomplished?
So many things to work through, but first, she had to deal with the fact that someone had been in her home and had stolen the evidence. She systematically checked all of the iCloud accounts she had created as backups, none of them had been touched. At least there was that.
How had they missed all of the other accounts?
She checked the internet history to see if an attempt had been made and came to realize that the history had been cleared. But, looking back over each of the pages she had visited since all appeared as one single visit to iCloud.com. So whoever it was that opened her laptop and deleted all of the files on the account that was logged into, would not suspect that there might be others.
That saved her, she felt like she had outwitted whoever it was that had poor sleuthing skills.
Next, she opened her front door to determine how they had gotten in. There were no signs of forced-entry, no scratches around the lock to indicate that someone had picked it. That left the fact that they had found her spare key and used it to get in.
She felt above the door where she placed it upon moving in. No key.
“Huh.”
She looked up and down the hallway, suddenly certain that someone was watching her now. She quickly went back inside the apartment and closed the door, sliding the chain in place. So, not only had they used the key but they kept it. Did they intend to return?
Home no longer felt safe. It had, in the span of seconds become a shell of its former haven, a death trap. A violated sanctuary that felt tainted. What else had they touched? Were they still here?
Had they bugged her apartment?
For the next half hour, she moved room to room moving things around, pulling furniture from walls, checking electronics, working quietly in the bedroom with a flashlight around Phil who slept through it all. But it was useless. Technology had advanced to the point that cameras and listening devices could be very small or look like a legitimate object such as a pen or a fire alarm. If something is there, would she know it?
She sat on the sofa, her
knees to her chest, hugging herself. Eyes narrowed in thought, items on the floor all around her, one thought became increasingly clear. She did not want to stay here any more.
Sudden movement from the bedroom caught her attention, as she screamed she caught sight of Phil in his boxers rubbing his eyes. He looked just as surprised as she was, the sleep shorn away by the sharpness of her outcry.
She managed a laugh, “I’m sorry, I forgot you were here.”
He looked around the apartment with the flick of his eyes, then settled on her face,
“Redecorating?”
Self-conscious, she dipped her head, “No.”
“Obviously. I was just trying to make light of it. Is everything okay?”