Chapter 3
“What in all twenty seven planes of existence is happening here?”
Cleo’s clear voice rang out as they stood on Abigail’s front porch and waited for her to unlock the door so that John and the other marshal could go inside and check the house.
Abigail winced. Considering how late they had ended up arriving, she had been hoping that Cleo would be asleep. True to Abigail’s luck and to Cleo’s nosiness, her neighbor had been as eagle-eyed as ever.
“Twenty seven?” Byron asked, turning to face her.
“It’s from a show we used to watch,” Abigail explained, bracing herself for what was about to happen.
“Sure is, back when we were friends and we told each other stuff,” Cleo said, her hands coming to rest on her hips.
Abigail turned. She could feel Bee almost trembling beside her—she obviously knew Cleo’s wrath would be aimed at her soon.
“Cleo,” Abigail said, “we couldn’t tell you on the phone, and we literally just got back.”
“Mmhmm,” Cleo said, “and what couldn’t you tell me?”
There was a tap on Abigail’s shoulder—it was Bee. She stepped aside, and Bee moved between her and Byron. Abigail watched Cleo’s face drop into surprise and then anger.
“You ditched me—us! You don’t even call to say you’re all ri—”
Cleo’s sentence cut off abruptly and Bee tried to hide her lip and bruised cheekbone behind a hand.
“Oh my god, your face!” Cleo almost launched herself towards them and wrapped Bee in the tightest hug Abigail thought she had ever seen.
Bee squeaked but Cleo didn’t let up her grip on their friend.
“What happened!? Why?” Cleo asked as she broke away to examine Bee’s face.
“House is clear,” John said, “you ca— Oh, hello, ma’am. I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark that you’re unlikely to return to your home and mind your business?”
Abigail’s mouth fell open into a surprised grin. She was sure she looked utterly unhinged, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
“Well congratulations,” Cleo said dryly, “you got something right today. Well done, did you want a cookie?”
John shifted his weight back and forth from foot to foot, “Well, if you’ve got one.”
“I don’t, neither does she. You wanna pop to the store?”
“All right,” Abigail said. “Enough. Can we just go inside, please?”
The tension in the air was almost nauseating, or maybe that was just her own anxiety, Abigail wasn’t sure anymore. Abigail could tell Byron was waiting for someone else to break the silence.
“Sure,” John said, clearly put off by the exchange.
As they made their way inside, Abigail noted that all of the lights were on—the two marshals must have hit the switches as they went through the house. Her kitchen was exactly as she had left it, but Abigail had to force her eyes away from the crime scene tape that was still on the door to the office.
With an angry glare in its general direction, Abigail thought, couldn’t they have taken that down? For Pete’s sake, it’s not like coming home to a break-in is ever going to be pleasant, but the least they could do is make it not an actual trauma.
She came to rest at the kitchen counter, deciding whether she wanted to brew a pot of tea—nice tea—to make herself feel better, when she felt a warm presence behind her. He wasn’t quite touching her, but she could tell he was standing so close that all she’d have to do was lean back, and she would be pressed against him.
“I’ll take it down,” Byron whispered, leaning down so his warm breath tickled her ear.
“Thank you,” she whispered back.
He moved away suddenly and stepped behind the counter, “Tea?”
She nodded, now very aware of the cold absence of him. How had their kiss only been that morning? It felt like days and she itched to talk to him about it. To try it again, she realized, feeling her face growing warmer. Abigail’s eyes flicked to Byron’s face, and she was surprised to see him looking at her with a much better-concealed hunger than had been on his countenance that morning, but she could still see it under his calm and steady gaze. Then it was gone, replaced by a calm mask as John entered the room with Cleo and Bee in tow.
“So, ladies, I know it’s probably hard to remember something you saw only briefly,” John said, “but do any of you remember the information written down in those notebooks or the copied documents? I know you girls probably don’t remember the exact numbers or anything, but—”
Byron snorted a laugh as he fussed with the tea making things, a laugh that he quickly turned into a cough when John glared at him.
“Is it harder for us ladies to remember things?” Cleo asked dryly, “With our silly lady brains?”
They all watched while John’s face tinged pink and slowly darkened.
“That is not what I meant,” John said, “I just, you know, I uh, that’s not fair—”
“Oh, just put him out of his misery,” Bee said, “it’s so off-putting when he squirms.”
She didn’t look put off; in fact, Abigail was fairly certain that she was loving it as much as Cleo. Cleo shrugged and pulled out a thick stack of paper from her side bag, letting it fall and hitting the table with a crash.
“If only silly old me could have thought of a way to preserve all that interesting and incriminating evidence in a way that couldn’t be stolen,” Cleo said, sarcasm punctuating every word.
“You made a copy?” John asked, relief evident in his voice.
“I made several copies,” Cleo corrected, “a digital copy, of which there are a number of additional and independent backups, this and one other physical copy, and a third physical copy I’ve posted on the slowest possible mail by sea to the Outer Hebrides. That’s in the north of Scotland, for any of who don’t know, where the resident at the named address knows to mark it return to sender. I expect it will arrive in six to twelve months.”
Abigail had to roll her lips tightly and squeeze her eyes closed to stop laughing. Cleo’s deadpan delivery and totally straight face were impeccable, and John’s expression of utter confusion was delightful.
“Did… did you really do that?”
Cleo leaned her hip against the chair, emphasizing her already long legs, and tapped a manicured finger against her chin as she made exaggerated thoughtful faces.
“No,” Cleo said suddenly, dropping the pondering act, “that part I made up to see how gullible you are, but the rest is true.”
She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. Looking up at John, she gestured to the free seats.
“Well? Are you going to sit down and get to work?”
Without another word, she flipped through the stack of papers and chose a place to split it in two. Cleo began reading and jotting down notes almost straight away, leaving John to stare for a second before taking a seat.
It was interesting to see how quickly the group settled into a comfortable silence and read through their stacks before passing them to the next person. Byron fixed everyone a cup of tea and delivered them silently, even when John looked confused at the substance before him. It wasn’t until about half an hour later, just after Bee had passed Abigail a photocopy of a bank statement, that Abigail’s brain made a connection.
“Huh, hey look at this,” she said, holding the paper out in front of her, “bank statement from Jacob’s dad. Every four weeks, like clockwork, there’s a five hundred dollar withdrawal. The handwritten note on the side says ‘six months,’ and the total. There are no other big cash withdrawals… that could be blackmail, right?”
“Why did you jump to blackmail?” John asked. “Why not gambling or a mistress with bills to pay?”
He leaned in and took the paper from her, examining it closely.
“Well, Jacob’s biological father was prone to a bit of the old extortion,” Abigail said, “it’s hardly a leap.”
“What would he be blackmailing him over?” Byron asked, “You think he was having an affair after all?”
John looked confused, so Abigail filled him in. “Jacob and I thought his dad was cheating on his mom, he had done it before. Then we found out… well we were told that Jacob’s dad wasn’t actually his father. I can guarantee you he didn’t know. He was worried about inheriting health things from his dad, even if he was pretending to keep up appearances. He would hardly be worried about heart disease if he knew that he wasn’t a blood relation…”
“Ah,” John said, “right, that does seem unlikely. Daddy issues, sure, heart issues, less so.”
“Daddy issues,” Bee said suddenly. “I think I know what the blackmail was.”
She flipped through the stack of papers next to her, picked up a printed photograph of a napkin, and read out what was scrawled on it.
“Daddy, where are you? Daddy, who are you? What a pity when Daddy isn’t you.”
Abigail had seen the picture before but must have skimmed over the writing, “jeez, that’s rough.”
“Makes sense, though,” John said, “okay, so Bio Dad is blackmailing Daily Dad. What else do we know about them?”
“Daily Dad beat Jacob up and down the coast,” Cleo filled in, “multiple hospital reports from different places for classic abuse injuries.”
“Bio Dad died in the walk-in freezer in his shop,” Byron said.
“His dad went somewhere in the week before the crash,” Abigail said, “he wanted to follow him… I think I went with him.”
“You think?” John asked, “You don’t know, but you think?”
Abigail’s eyebrows came together in confusion. Was he actually trying to bait her? She was pretty sure he and the Marshal Service had a detailed history of everyone involved being tangential to the current situation—there was no way he didn’t know about her memory issues.
“Yeah,” she said, shifting in her seat, “I had a flashback and remembered him talking about it…”
Her eyes flicked to the table in the corner of the kitchen where she had experienced the flashback, one of the most grueling of her life.
“Like, you remembered?”
Abigail resisted making a face at John; he seemed to have set on abrasiveness as his path.
“The result was that I remembered something that happened but a flashback—a real one, not the fade to fuzzy glowing figures you see in movies—is more like you physically feel like it’s reality and you can’t always tell it’s not real until you realize the person you’re chatting to has been dead for years. They’re also not always fully, like, memory. I once had one where I was talking to my old English teacher about the girl’s new school. I hadn’t seen her in twenty-five years, but for those few minutes, my brain was pretty convinced that she was sitting in my kitchen chatting away.”
She knew what was coming next, but Abigail also secretly hoped that John would have the emotional intelligence not to say it.
“So it’s like a daydream that gets out of hand? How do you know which is a memory and which is a delusion?”
“They’re not delusions,” she explained, disappointed, “they can occur for people who are having delusions or hallucinations, but they are not the same thing. And as for telling the difference between them, can you not tell the difference between the two things I just described? Reliving a memory in the first person feels like déjà vu versus having a conversation about something happening in your life and it feeling weird and out of place, then realizing that the person you’re thinking about or talking to can’t possibly be there. Then feeling like an idiot for a long time after and wondering how you could prevent this from happening again.”
John had the good sense to wince and look apologetic as he replied, “Right, sorry, yeah, I do see that.”
“Public records are a beautiful thing,” Cleo said, breaking the tension, speaking casually like she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. “It turns out Jacob’s dad actually part-owned a portion of that warehouse.”
“Which warehouse?” John asked, his voice strained.
“The one these two went to,” Cleo said, “where Abigail…”
Her sentence trailed off as she realized both Bee and Abigail had gotten very quiet, very quickly.
“Which warehouse? Where Abigail what?” John repeated slowly, watching Bee and Abigail as he spoke.
Abigail sighed, “The one where that big shootout happened, the bust gone wrong. We went down out of morbid curiosity, but when we were there… well, it kind of triggered a memory.”
“That sounds like there’s a lot more to it than that,” John said, “keep going.”
“I got a few flashes of a memory—night time, Jacob and I hiding behind the shelving units. Scared, terrified actually, then running,” Abigail said, “I think we did follow his dad. I think we followed him there and saw something we shouldn’t have.”