Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Zoe thumped the microwave that had frozen on her again. When it refused to work, she gave up and decided to eat her chocolate croissant cold. She retrieved it and dug her teeth into it, savoring the sweetness exploding in her mouth.
It was a gloomy morning in Pineview Falls.
The drive from the motel to the substation was riddled with water pooling in cracked pavement and mist curling off the wet asphalt.
The wind rattled loose power lines, making them sway like tired ghosts.
The drizzle had become a steady downpour.
Zoe looked out the window into the bleak, blurry landscape. Her heart did a little rattle.
“Jackie’s step-sister, Amy, is waiting for us.” Aiden appeared next to her, stifling a yawn. His cheeks tinged pink in embarrassment.
Zoe rolled her eyes. “You’re human, Aiden. You can yawn. Didn’t bring your mattress with you?”
He rolled up his sleeves. “I’m trying to be more flexible. It’s a personal project. Do you have one?”
It looked like friendly chatter to anyone else. But Zoe didn’t miss the pointed twinkle in his eyes, the little movements he made to conceal that he wasn’t curious about her response. She clenched her jaw. Would he ever stop trying to psychoanalyze her?
“Aiden, we can be friends if you learn to just accept me for who I am, as supposed to trying to find someone else in me.”
His hand, pouring the coffee, stopped in midair. He took a few seconds to reply, like he was choosing his words. “Maybe I’m just getting to know you. You ever thought about that?” He walked past her.
Her face flushed. When did she become so cynical?
She wore the rainbows and unicorns on her face.
She brazenly showed the world that she wasn’t jaded or dulled by what her profession entailed.
It wasn’t a facade; it was who she was. At least, one of who she was.
There was another person that resided inside her, hidden in the folds of her brain and screaming to be free.
“Did you find anything? From my old case files?” she asked, trying to be more professional.
“I have a lead. But I just want to confirm something.”
“Oh.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. “But you think whoever sent me that riddle has a bone to pick with me?”
He shrugged. “What other reason could there be but to challenge you? The letter was sent to you, Storm. Not the FBI. I’m looking into it.”
“Guilt is a shitty feeling.” She squared her shoulders and headed to their makeshift office, where a thickset woman with lush, golden curls and doe-like eyes sat, playing with the strap of her purse.
“Amy, I’m Zoe Storm from the FBI and this is Dr. Aiden Wesley.”
“What is this regarding?” She shook their hands confidently.
Zoe gestured at Aiden to go ahead.
“Jackie Fink is your sister?”
“ Step -sister. My father married her mother. Jackie kept her biological father’s last name. Is she okay?” She frowned.
“When was the last time you heard from her?”
“I don’t know. Last week? What’s going on?”
Zoe braced herself to break the news. “She’s missing. We have reason to believe she might be in trouble.”
“ What ?” Her jaw hung open and then a range of emotions crossed her face, from confusion to shock to concern. “W-why? I don’t understand.”
“Did she ever mention Annabelle Stevens to you?” Aiden asked.
“No. I don’t think so. Isn’t that the woman who was murdered?” Her eyes bugged out. “Has Jackie been abducted too?”
“We don’t have evidence of anything yet. It’s better for the investigation if you keep things to yourself for now,” Zoe said, trying to reassure her. “Are you sure she’s never mentioned Annabelle?”
“Positive. Though, maybe they met through work?”
“At the café?” Aiden prodded.
“That or Jackie’s new gig. She was working freelance as a video game tester.”
“Oh.” Zoe frowned. “For whom?”
“Harrington Group.” Amy’s gaze slid back and forth between them. “They are apparently making some video game, or they were, I don’t know. But Jackie was working part-time for them.”
Zoe and Aiden locked eyes. Finally, they’d discovered the link between Annabelle and Jackie—they weren’t merely friends from the coffee shop who had bonded over a couple of lattes.
They both worked for the same company that Adam was trying to hold to account in his article.
Zoe wondered if there was any truth to what she’d dismissed as pure speculation.
“You and Jackie are from here, right? Pineview Falls,” Aiden said. “Townies usually have families and friends. From her home, it didn’t seem like she had many people in her life or even a boyfriend.”
Amy blinked through her tears. “She… was very lonely. And we weren’t nearly as close we should have been. She was kind of a mess.” She couldn’t keep the judgment out of her voice.
Zoe mulled over that information. Jackie was young and beautiful, having spent years walking the same streets and seeing the same faces and knowing the same corners of Pineview Falls.
And yet she had managed to float through the dreadful town instead of putting down any meaningful roots.
Did the dreariness of Pineview Falls get under her skin and cloud her mind?
Did it dim her light and make her want to be alone?
“What mess?” Aiden asked.
“I feel bad…”
“You’ll only be helping us,” he explained gently. “The difference between you both is evident. I’m guessing you have seen the world, invested in your education. But Jackie wasn’t interested in building anything, was she?”
Zoe resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Aiden was being Aiden—playing the vulnerable woman in front of him like a fiddle. He’d sniffed her superiority complex.
A flash of pride crossed Amy’s face. “She was a hermit and obsessed with the fire. Her brother died in it.” Her words chilled Zoe.
All roads at Pineview Falls led to the fire.
She imagined what the inside of Jackie’s mind must look like.
Every thought, every dream, every fantasy dictated by the tragedy she couldn’t stop researching.
“She was obsessed.” She gave a small smile.
“Who wouldn’t be in this town? I kept telling her to do something with her life but the fire was a black hole she kept falling into. ”
“Do you know who MF is?” Zoe asked, remembering the calendar. “There was a date circled on a calendar at Jackie’s house. September 5. It’s MF’s birthday. A boyfriend perhaps?”
“Oh, no, no. That’s her brother. Michael. Michael Fink. What a shame for her mother. She lost one child to fire and the other child to madness.”
Zoe didn’t like the dark. Always slept with a night light. She imagined herself running around like a headless chicken, desperately trying to escape the total blackness. Outside, the wind snaked through the empty streets, rattling loose street signs and making the old lampposts flicker.
Sitting in the only Chinese restaurant in town, she rubbed the chopsticks between her palms, eagerly looking at the spread of cheap, greasy Chinese food, as she took her time deciding what to eat first. To her annoyance, Aiden neatly scooped a portion of each dish onto his plate.
He tossed over a fortune cookie to her. She cracked it open—and imagined Rachel’s hands instead of her own.
It was their thing when they got Chinese food.
The answers you seek are not ahead but buried in you.
A thick stack of all research and case files into the Pineview Falls tragedy awaited her. It sucked out all the oxygen in the room. The tale of how six teenagers died together.
“Is that why this town feels like a cemetery?” Zoe wondered aloud. “Because of what happened all those years ago?”
“It’s collective trauma response. Small towns are closed ecosystems, meaning everyone is either directly or indirectly connected to the victims. That grief doesn’t dissipate.
It lingers, passed down like folklore.” He picked at his noodles, his eyes staring into empty space.
“And then there is the displacement of time. These towns exist in a kind of psychological purgatory, where the past is more present than the future.”
The wind whistled. Windows rattled. The velvety darkness outside folded and stirred. The town wasn’t just scarred from the violent deaths; it was calcified. And even though Zoe had only been here four days, she could already feel herself becoming a part of the echo.
Her phone buzzed with a notification. She looked at it and a smile broke across her lips.
“What is it?” Aiden asked.
She laughed at the goofy picture. “My sister just sent me a picture of my nephew. Do you have any siblings?”
“Four.”
She almost dropped her phone. “ What ? You have four siblings?”
He shrugged. “Why are you surprised?”
“I just assumed you grew up in a mental institution,” she quipped. She caught him almost smile before his face became hard like granite. “Anyway, coming back to this, Jackie was obsessed with the fire. Do you think that has anything to do with our case?”
He narrowed his eyes at the files. “I want to say no. It’s not surprising she was obsessed. She’d lived here all her life. I imagine a lot of people here are fascinated by it. But it will be useful to understand what happened.”
Zoe licked her fingers clean, much to Aiden’s horror, and divided the files between them.
“Let’s get cracking.” She flipped through the pages, quickly absorbing the details.
“Wow. So much here is handwritten. How many people do you think had carpal tunnel in the 1980s? November 1. Dispatch Center received a 911 call at 23:42 hours from an unidentified caller reporting ‘bodies’ at Fun House. Patrol units were dispatched at 23:44 hours. First officers on scene at 23:58 hours. EMS and fire personnel arrived at 00:07 hours. No survivors located.”
“I got the medical examiner findings.” Aiden read out from the file and his face fell.
“Jesus. These kids range from the ages of fifteen to seventeen. They went through a ringer, Storm. Before the fire started, they were running around in total darkness, tripping over things and bumping around, trying to get out. They have physical injuries antemortem.”
She cracked her knuckles, pushing aside the images trying to pop up in her mind. “It’s hard to believe that everything went wrong in a haunted house. They have so many elements—fog machine, lighting rigs, automated circuits, mechanical props. How do all of them fail?”
“This was the 1990s. Safety wasn’t a priority. And this Fun House was only three years old. More parts mean more failure points.”
“I suppose.” She scanned the notes and pictures.
The skeletal remains of the haunted house structure, half-collapsed, with blackened wood and melted plastic.
Props or animatronic figures fused into grotesque, half-melted shapes, their faces distorted.
Floorboards with deep charring in streaks.
She didn’t dare to look at the pictures with bodies.
Her blood curdled. “So this is what everyone in this town is obsessed with.”
A deep frown marred Aiden’s face as he focused on something, his eyes narrowing behind his thick glasses. “Do you see this?”
Zoe followed. There were faint impressions of something scribbled in the footnotes. “Someone partially erased their notes.”
He picked up a pencil and began shading it, then he turned it over and read the words out loud. “Multiple ignition points. Charring underneath wooden floorboards. Downward fire pattern.”
“They could have been just jotting down their thoughts before finalizing the report,” she suggested but pulled out her phone and researched the observations. Surprise flickered on her face. “Interesting. These are indicators of arson.”
His eyebrows shot up. “A deliberate act? Engineered to look like a malfunction.”
“It’s hard to say. Maybe they were just preliminary observations and whoever wrote this erased it, realizing their mistake.” She glanced at the pictures again, trying to decipher if what was written was true. “We should try to verify this.”
“There are a few people listed here as part of the expert panel. I’ll get a handwriting analysis done to see whose writing this was.”
She drummed her fingers on the table. “I can believe there were no witnesses and no one heard them, but what about the staff? There must have been at least one operator.”
Aiden nodded, turned a page, and recoiled. “There was only one person on shift during this incident. David Harrington.”