Chapter 6
It was raining for what felt like the three-hundredth day in a row—even though she had only been in town for a week. She did have to admit though, the bay was very pretty in the rain... Well, when she was tucked up all cozy in a nice café with a coffee and a slice of cake, it was very pretty. Right now, because she needed to run out to the store to get something, it was decidedly not pretty. Abigail sighed as she shut the front door. Her valiant attempt to leave the house armed with her umbrella was officially over.
Despite being in town for a week, she had found herself at almost exactly square one with the house. She’d made plenty of excuses—giving herself time to settle in, get used to being without the girls, make sure her sleep schedule was fine...
In truth, she hadn’t wanted to get started because she was scared.
Scared of what she’d find—almost as much as what she might not find.
What if she came all this way, did all the sorting and cleaning, made all her inquiries—and walked away with absolutely nothing?
Abigail gave herself a little shake—she was staring at the closed front door like a cat staring at a wall.
“Right,” she said out loud, “come on, let’s go.”
Turning on her heel, she snatched up the half-full garbage bag in the hall and purposefully strode towards the bedrooms. Her heart clenched as she passed the halfway point. The thought of her old room... she knew, logically, that it would be empty. She’d packed up all her stuff and shipped it when they moved. She stopped in the hallway; all those holiday rental folks sleeping in there made her feel weird—like she had swallowed something cold.
She glanced to the side, at the door to the old study. That would do nicely to start. The day wasn’t a failure if she got a different room finished or at least started, right?
The door was heavier than she remembered it being, but as she leaned on it, the door swung open to reveal a weirdly decorated space.
Half the room looked like your typical coastal town bed and breakfast—a little too nautically themed for every day but just a little beaten up. The other half looked like the set of a low-budget crime drama where the harrowed ex-detective turned private eye with a heart of gold works day and night to solve the case. Abigail stepped into the room and looked around. The sensation of two rooms ripped in half and hastily stuck back together with craft glue was strong. Even the wallpaper stopped just before the desk.
A weird thrill ran through her as she looked at the legs of the desk—they were bolted to the floor.
Her heart was beating hard as she tried to remember what this room had looked like when she was a teenager. Not only was it twenty years ago, but she barely ever came in here—it was her dad’s only space that he had to himself. He had run the accountancy business out of here, and considering all the private information he kept on his clients, it had always made sense that he kept the door locked.
Lowering herself to her knees, Abigail wrapped a hand around the table leg and shook it to test it. Totally solid, it didn’t even wobble. Suddenly, she was filled with a familiar sensation—an old memory resurfacing.
She had been absolutely terrified the first time this had happened; a memory from long before the summer she’d forgotten coming back to her at an unexpected time and feeling the same way it did when she was struggling to remember a detail from that summer. At first, she thought it meant that all her memories were going to disappear, but her specialist, Doctor Lavender, had assured her that it was a common occurrence. When you attach an emotional significance to retrieving a memory, your brain can often trigger the feeling along with the action of retrieving any long term memory, he had said.
She swallowed hard and reoriented herself so she was sitting flat on the ground instead of on her knees. She pulled out her phone and opened her notes app, where she added a new line to the table titled ‘Memory Events’.
After typing in the date, time, how much water she’d had to drink, and how long it had been since she’d last eaten, Abigail briefly recounted the events of the last few minutes.
Her symptom diary was the bane of her existence but it also made her life infinitely easier when it came time for her checkups or—worst of all—seeing a new doctor.
Newport house—study. Old memory, BC 5ish years, not a true flashback, wave of anxiety and slight nausea, déjà vu. While looking at the furniture in my dad’s old office and trying to remember what it looked like when I lived here (age 0 to 18), I knelt down to look at something and the memory of doing the same thing when I was maybe 13 or 14 (4 or 5 years Before Crash) when I’d come in to ask my dad something and I’d dropped the box of beads I was holding. I needed to crawl around on the carpet to pick them all up.
“On the carpet,” she muttered, glaring at the hardwood floor that was there now.
Saving and syncing the note app with the cloud backup, she locked the phone and rose to her feet. She had been pretty happy with how well she had been doing, considering she was back in town where she’d grown up before the crash that split her life in two...
As she took slow steps around the study, Abigail looked around her carefully. A lot of what she remembered was still there. The art on the walls, the bookshelves, and the wallpaper—on the desk side of the room—was all the same. The shelves themselves, though, were half empty. Abigail approached to read the spines, her eyebrows arching up as she did. Some of these were her dad’s books—accounting guides, bound tax law, and textbooks now all very out of date—but the others were second-hand store detritus she was certain her dad would never have owned. Poor condition cloth-bound editions of old stories that no one had ever read, leather-bound encyclopedias and dictionaries from the fifties, and multiple copies of the same handful of classic novels.
“So weird,” she muttered.
The latter of these books had probably been placed there by some overeager property manager—probably the same one who thought the tiny yellow sailboat wallpaper had been a good idea—in a misguided attempt to make the holiday rental feel lived in.
She pressed her hands against the heavy desk; it would have been hard to move even if it hadn’t been bolted to the floor. The legs seemed to be made from solid steel, which were welded to a similar metal frame around the solid wood tabletop.
“So very, very weird,” she said aloud to no one as she ran her fingers along the cold metal frame.
Her dad wouldn’t have owned this, this wasn’t the desk she remembered. That had been a heavy wooden desk as well but topped with dark green leather and decorated with faux carved swirls in the corners. She flinched as her fingers caught against something sharp under the desk.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, yanking her hand back to see a thin slice in the pad of her finger and a crimson drop of blood.
Glaring at it, Abigail shifted from her seat and climbed under the desk, turning the flashlight on her phone on to try and see what had been so damn sharp.
A poorly executed drill hole in the steel frame was surrounded by burrs from where the drill bit had cut in. One particular burr was shining with wet blood and Abigail felt her finger throb at the sight.
What was that for? she wondered as she leaned in to inspect it closer. There was one central large hole with two smaller holes on either side.
Like screws holding something in place,she realized. Leaning in even closer, she could see something inside the metal tubing—a flat piece of bright metal held taught between two points, forcing it to arc up between them. Reaching with her other hand out from underneath the desk, she felt along the metal frame for any sign of this being fastened there but there was nothing.
The more she looked at it, the more familiar it seemed, then she realized that it was a very similar design to the way a lot of electrical switches worked—you press a button on the outside of something, a metal ribbon is pushed down into contact with other components, completing a circuit.
This doesn’t look electrical,she reasoned, while pulling a hairpin from her messily constructed bun, and repositioning her flashlight to see into the hole better. Carefully, she pressed the end of the hairpin against the center of the metal ribbon. With a satisfyingly crisp click, it popped into an arc exactly opposite how she had found it, but before she could celebrate, she heard the soft snip of a latch opening. The wood panel siding of the draw to her left popped out, tapping her on the leg and causing her to yelp in surprise.
A yellow envelope sat nestled in the small space between the false side and the real one. Abigail stared at it, a looming feeling gathering in her stomach; just as she reached for it, she heard something that made her blood run cold.
A floorboard creaking in the hall.
Her heart rate leaped and she suddenly felt like every breath she took was loud enough to wake the dead. There was someone in her house and she didn’t know why. She didn’t know how she was so sure—old houses made noises, that was but a fact of life—but she knew it in her bones that someone else was in here with her. She could see the door from her position under the desk, but she was fairly sure anyone standing in the doorway couldn’t see her. Could they…? She desperately thought back to try to remember what it had looked like when she’d stood there ten minutes ago.
Another footstep and she thought she would throw up.
“Abigail?” a man’s voice called out.
Despite a flare of panic at the sound of her name, a logical part of her brain tried to butt in and point out that a burglar was unlikely to either know her name or announce himself during the break in.
“Abby?” the voice came again, this time closer, “It’s Byron—your front door was hanging open—are you in here?”
A mixture of relief and nausea flooded her body, and she called out, “Byron!? Jeez, you scared the life out of me!”
After answering, she realized that she had spoken before she had crawled out from underneath the desk. She scrambled to try and pull herself out. The image of him finding her while she was cowering in a corner like a lost puppy was mortifying.
His shoes arrived in the corner of her eye and she sighed… too late.
“Are you okay? I’m so sorry, I did call out—I swear. I even rang your phone,” he said as he offered her his hand.
“Really? It didn’t ring...”
She inspected her phone screen. No missed calls—but also no coverage.
“Huh,” she said, “must be a dead spot.”
“Sure,” Byron said, “why was your door open?”
“I must have not latched it properly,” she replied, embarrassment curling in her stomach as she spoke, “and I must have been too distracted to hear you call out. Thanks for checking—though I don’t feel like housebreaking is particularly common around here?”
Byron smiled. “Of course I’d check. Nothing good comes from a wide open front door, no matter where you live. Why were you under a desk?”
His voice hitched, and she looked up at him, expecting to see him smirking but he wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking at the now open desk front.
The draws, as she’d thought they were, weren’t draws at all but rather a single door joined together to look like decorative draws that swing forward on a thick metal plate.
“Something under the desk cut my finger so I was investigating,” she said absently as she moved to look at the door more closely, “I found an ex-button.”
Inside the faux draws were stacks of bare DVDs, a few permanent markers, six small screens, and a large black box with cables coming out of it at all angles.
“An ex-button?” he asked, also getting closer.
She squatted down in front of the open space and lit it up with her phone’s flashlight.
“Yeah, a thing that used to be a button. I pressed it, and this opened,” she said, squinting to read the faded words on the black box. “What... is this? Secura-365 XS...”
Byron let out a low whistle, “That is a security system... one that would have cost half of my yearly salary back when it was installed.”