Chapter Sixteen
Lee sipped her coffee as she pressed the power button on her monitor and watched it come to life with an energetic greeting sound that had somehow managed to jump-scare her for an entire year before she gradually got used to it.
More often than not, Lee Holmes would much prefer to sit amongst the confines of her living room, wearing her standard slippers and dinosaur pajamas.
Today was an exception to the rule, finding herself grateful for the distraction that work occasionally brought.
The distant ring from the telephones that surrounded her office cubicle, the sounds of technology whirring—she welcomed it.
The sounds of technology were always preferable to the sounds of someone being murdered.
Through no coincidence, the woman in the cubicle beside hers just so happened to be Kat.
The pair of them had met at a work Christmas party and instantly decided there and then that out of their standard array of workmates, Lee was the most tolerable to Kat, and Kat was the most tolerable to Lee.
Kat moved office cubicles the next day to be closer to Lee, and that was that.
Two years later, seasons had come and gone, but their affection for each other remained, blossoming into a friendship.
Kat leaned over the partition, which wasn’t unusual, grabbing a highlighter pen from Lee’s desk in order to claim it as her own.
“You look like shit,” she said, as a way of greeting, donning her standard cheeky grin, expelling shiny white teeth as the highlighter pen shifted from view, presumably onto Kat’s desk.
Lee returned the smile, scrunching up an old piece of paper, namely a discarded journal article that had been sitting on her desk for three weeks too long, before throwing it at Kat. “Hey!” Lee exclaimed in mock offence. “At least I bring my own stationery to work!”
“Now, why would I bring my own when I could just steal yours? Way more fun,” she acknowledged, winking as she threw the piece of paper back onto Lee’s desk for it to likely sit and remain there for another three weeks.
“Perry wants us to work together on an article today. It’s about some rando dude that went missing within the last couple of days.
I don’t really know a whole lot yet because I don’t do anything within the first hour of my shift. ”
Lee snickered. “You say that like you think I don’t know that you sit there half the day blowing bubbles with your chewing gum.
” Now that her computer was on, she opened up her internet browser, typed in “New York” & “Missing”, and clicked on the “News” tab, in order to gauge a sense of what had already been published about the missing person in question.
The last thing they needed was to write a reproduction of what had already been printed.
When an older gentleman's face underneath the word “missing” appeared within the first article she clicked on, her pupils expanded.
The face before her was not dissimilar to the face that she had literally seen less than two hours ago, branded on a driver's license.
A driver’s license, more importantly, that was presently underneath her bedroom floorboards. She was grateful, at the very least, that she had made the sensible decision of leaving it there as opposed to placing it in her purse to use as ammunition against Morgan later.
Scrolling through the page haphazardly now, Lee scanned through the article at an accelerated pace in a desperate attempt to discover the man’s name.
Kat ushered the words “Arthur Strickland,” at the same time she saw it splayed across the screen, confirming the worst. “Seems like he just left in the middle of the night without any explanation. It’s so weird how people can simply wake up one day and then just suddenly… disappear,” she added.
Isn’t it just, Lee thought, closing the page down as if she could close down this entire chapter of her life for good. She leaned back in her chair, her eyes wandering over towards Kat’s. “Do we know anything about him?” she asked. “Anything about his…lifestyle, or…?”
“His lifestyle?” Kat mimicked, distastefully. “That just makes me think of all those homophobic assholes who call being queer a ‘lifestyle choice’,” she quoted with her fingers, before placing one of said fingers in her mouth as if pretending to vomit.
Lee heard it too when she said it, and yet at present time she wanted to know just about anything Kat could give her, hence the broad and yet strangely worded question.
His preferences concerning whether he used a manual or electric toothbrush would be welcomed information considering how newly desperate she was to discover something, anything, she didn't know already.
She just wanted to know why Morgan had his driving license under their bed where they slept. Was he already dead?
There it was, the concoction of nerves and power again. Lee thought she just might vomit for real at the sheer anxiety of it all, and yet underneath, the idea of being one of two people in the world to potentially know of Arthur’s fate felt somewhat…exhilarating.
Except, she didn’t know, not for definite.
And until she did, she was just like everyone else at the office, plugging away at articles with unanswered questions, in search of the truth.
An onlooker, not the participant. “Yeah, that’s my bad.
I guess I’m still a little hungover," Lee lied, having adopted the sensible choice of downing a glass of water before bed after their night out, before making the less than sensible choice of diving under the sheets with her serial killer girlfriend straight afterwards. “I mean, there has to be something about him, a factor in his life, perhaps, that triggered his unknown whereabouts. People don’t tend to just…disappear. Not random fifty-four-year-old men, anyway.”
Kat looked at Lee inquisitively, scratching her head, and before she had even opened her mouth, Lee knew that she had said the wrong thing. “Huh…interesting. I wasn’t aware of his age. You read fast, Holmes. You had that article open for like…two seconds.”
It occurred to Lee all of a sudden that the knowledge of Arthur’s age was not obtained from the article, but rather, his driver’s license. I’m terrible at this, she thought. Next, I’ll be telling Kat he’s an organ donor.
A smile peaked at the corner of her lips at another terrible notion. Perhaps he already donated his organs to one ‘Morgan Finch.’ The guilt of finding such things humorous settled her back into reality again, within the confines of her office. “Hate the player, not the game, Kat.”
Kat’s own lips curved into a smile as she went out of view for just a moment.
Hearing the scrunching sounds on the other side of the partition, Lee knew to quickly dodge out of the way of an incoming paper ball as it skimmed her hair and fell somewhere underneath the desk where it would remain with all the other missed shots, like a paper ball graveyard.
“Whatever, Holmes. Let me grab us both another coffee and then we can get started.”
“My, my, only 9:18am and Katherine Myers is already desperate to start working despite her usual proclivities,” Lee jested, pretending to check her watch as her eyes diverted towards her wrist.
“You tell anybody about this, and I’ll start setting my paper balls on fire before I throw them at you. I’ve got a reputation to uphold, you know?” Kat winked, before stepping out of her office cubicle, around the corner, and out of view entirely.
When there was nothing left but ringing phones, and whirring technology, Lee leaned back in her office chair and exhaled until she was nothing but a deflated balloon.
If she inhaled again, she deduced that she could pop at any moment.
Alas, people needed to breathe in order to survive, and so, she took an intake of breath and prayed to an unknown entity that she would make it through the day with bad jokes and even worse coffee.
If she wanted both herself, and Morgan, to stay out of prison, she had to.