Chapter 29
twenty-nine
JO
I study the bruises on my body after I step out of the shower. I’m getting faster, stronger. I know I am because I took Ezra by surprise right before the end of our session this morning. He’s going to have a nasty bruise on his ribs.
I quickly get dressed in leggings and a warm, oversized knit sweater.
It’s supposed to storm tonight, and I love watching storms from the glass door in the kitchen.
It looks right out over the cliff. Sometimes I’ll even sit on the patio and watch the clouds roll in over the water.
Under different circumstances, I would love this place, and even though I’ve come to enjoy parts of it, it still feels like a prison.
My phone pings from where it’s resting on the charger on my nightstand.
It spends most of its time there since the only phone numbers in there are Harlow, Ezra, Martha, and Darren.
I talk to Ezra enough as it is, and I’m not about to start a friendship with a middle-aged couple when I can’t even give them my real name.
Harlow has her own alert noise and that wasn’t it.
That means the notification has to be for the podcast website.
Midnightmare5650: I did a deep dive on the dark web. We know that a death certificate was filed for Noelle Price, but what if she’s actually Gianna Delgado?
I stiffen. As far as anyone knows, Noelle Price is a victim of a faceless murderer, and Gianna Delgado died in a car accident.
There isn’t anything public connecting the two deaths.
When Harlow mentioned covering this case before we knew everything Ezra witnessed, I did a thorough search.
According to the only news article I could find about it, Noelle Price was found dead from blood loss, and they deemed her death suspicious.
That was it. No follow-up or family members to look into it.
It was classified as a cold case a few years later and that was the end of it.
The police report Harlow got her hands on blamed the mystery boyfriend and then closed the case.
It screamed shoddy police work, but now I’m thinking it was on purpose as a cover-up.
I ended up finding Noelle’s social media accounts, which led me to Gianna, but she turned out to be a dead end as well.
It’s hard to ask questions to a ghost. But what stood out to me was that the only thing I could find on Gianna was the official police report on the car accident with the unidentified victim.
No family outrage or cries for help to find the cause of the crash or the identity of the second victim, either.
The most interesting part? There was never a death certificate filed for Gianna Delgado.
That’s as far as I got before everything literally blew up.
There were no pictures attached to any of the articles, so I had no idea the murder victim was actually Gianna instead of Noelle.
So how could this Midnightmare person have connected the dots there?
This is why I love internet detectives. They find everything you want to keep hidden.
I can’t wait to go over everything with Ezra later.
It’s become part of the routine here, and I don’t know if I’m looking forward to it because there isn’t anyone else to talk to or because he seems genuinely interested, even when I’m not talking to him about Gianna’s case.
Ezra has this way of looking at me when I speak that makes me feel like I’m the most interesting person in the world.
It’s the type of attention that’s easy to get addicted to.
The kind of attention I can’t get addicted to. The problem is, I already am.