Chapter 19
I flick on the red bulb, and the darkroom awakens. My sanctuary. Or it used to be.
The counter to my left should have the waterfall photograph I need to show Detective Yankovic, particularly the one with the neon shirt and its embroidered Z.
There is only one person I know of in Doomwood Falls with the letter Z in her name, and that’s Zala.
She also happens to be the one digging up dirt on me. Coincidence? I think not.
But the counter is empty. No, it’s worse than empty.
The Leica camera my father gifted me is sitting there, out of place, and something about it doesn’t look right.
I pick it up, and the lens falls off. The viewfinder is cracked, and the back to the film compartment hangs sideways. My priceless camera has been destroyed.
Under it a slip of paper sits where my developed photos should be.
A single white square against the dark, like a baby’s first tooth.
I read the note without touching it, hoping maybe they can recover a fingerprint from the paper.
The handwriting is jagged and hurried, like someone wrote it before fleeing the scene of a crime… such as a break-in.
Stop talking to the cops or you’re next.
My throat dries instantly, turning into a desert canyon. A death threat left for me in my own darkroom. Fabulous. Exactly what every single woman wants to find before bedtime.
Whoever wrote this has been watching me and knows Detective Yankovic brought me in for questioning.
Is it Z for Zala? Or the man I spotted near the jewelry store?
It could be Zala and Ali working together.
But my top pick is volatile, angry, unpredictable Marshall.
The same Marshall who showed up drunk, pounding on my door at three o’clock in the morning, yelling my name—well, a version of my name—like a deranged psychopath.
Marshall knows where I live, even saw my broken front door, and he probably knows I talked to the cops.
Plus he has motive and already threatened me twice.
And once my brother got involved and beat him to a pulp, vengeance could very well be on the menu.
I can’t shake the feeling that he’d want payback.
There’s a faint creak somewhere in the house. Probably the pipes. Or a serial killer. Hard to tell in this economy. I try to steady my breathing, but my heart’s doing its best impression of a malfunctioning washing machine—thump-thump-thump.
Suddenly the darkroom terrifies me. I back toward the door without looking away from the empty spot where those photos should be. The threat is so real I can almost feel its presence.
Someone was here. Someone stole my photos. Someone has been watching me. Tomorrow my front door must get fixed, even if I have to seal it shut myself.
“Great,” I mutter. “I always wanted to star in my own true-crime documentary.”
I kill the red light and slip out of the darkroom. Whether it was Marshall or someone worse who destroyed my priceless camera and stole my photo evidence, one thing is suddenly very clear:
I’m not safe here.